Gibraltar Archives - The Automatic Earth

OMG! On this clip.

This doctor trained at the Mayo Clinic and runs the largest independent testing laboratory in Idaho.

Listen to what his lab testing is showing. pic.twitter.com/WmX7N3qKHK

— Jangled Nerves (@ToriaMart) November 14, 2021

SARS-CoV-2 is a highly transmissible aerosolized cytotoxic chimeric quasispecies RNA virus.
You’re not gonna get a worthwhile vaccine out of it.
In any form.
Ever.

“One wonders: is this child vax campaign an attempt to eliminate the last major control group in the population?”

• Who Will Answer? (Kunstler)

Did all that vaxxing help? It apparently did nothing to prevent transmission of the disease. The vaxxed were spreading it as effectively as the unvaxxed, and the vaxxed were catching the disease as easily, too, though supposedly suffering not as badly as the unvaxxed (if you choose to believe the official press releases, and why would you believe them?). Then, along came the reports of “adverse reactions” to the vaccines, many of them quite grave — clots, strokes, infarctions, neurological havoc, organ failure. In mid-October this year, the VAERS registry had it at 17,000 deaths and 26,000 permanent disabilities, and the rule-of-thumb was that these represented only 10 percent of the actual number of adverse events because the VAERS website was so badly designed that it crashed half the time any doctor tried to use it… plus the doctors were being silenced and punished for voicing any distrust of the vaccines.

Then why the mad rush to vaccinate all the children in America? There have been next-to-zero covid deaths among children besides a few hundred with grave co-morbidities like cancer or cystic fibrosis — and the hospitals had a cash subsidy incentive from the federal government to list them as dying “with Covid.” Children are far more likely to suffer harm from the vaccines than from the Covid-19 disease. The child vax experiment is only just underway, and there are already enough cases of myocarditis and other disorders to be very concerned. The medical establishment has no idea what the long-term effects on children might be, in particular on their reproductive systems, since the chief active ingredient in the vaccines, the spike protein, has a proclivity for the sexual organs. It happens, too, by the way, that mothers who got vaxxed in early 2021 are just now giving birth to babies with myocarditis and other signature disorders of adverse mRNA vaccine reactions. Keep your eye on that sub-plot of the story.

One wonders: is this child vax campaign an attempt to eliminate the last major control group in the population? (Or just to eliminate a big demographic chunk altogether?) Is it tied in some way to beating the release date for Pfizer’s “Comirnaty” vaccine — which would vacate the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that protects the pharma companies from liability? Despite delirious propaganda from the likes of National Public Radio, the bad news is out, and the bad news is that the Covid vaccines for children are bad news. Parents ought to object to any official attempts to coerce them into vaxxing their kids, but will they? I’d guess that the reaction will be ferocious. Stand by on that.

Meanwhile, what would be an intelligent response to Covid-19 at this point? Well, how about letting it burn through the population as expeditiously as possible, along with an aggressive nationwide early treatment program using existing effective drugs such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine, budesonide, monoclonal antibodies, for starters, along with vitamin D3, quercetin, zinc, selenium, N-acetyl L-cysteine (NAC)? That would minimize fatalities and confer superior natural immunity throughout the whole population.

“But if Pfizer did not rule the world two years ago, how did it come to rule the world today?”

• The Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine Monopoly: The Backstory (Kogon)

The notion that vaccine mandates and related measures to compel vaccination are the product of the influence of “Big Pharma” on governments is a commonplace among the critics of such measures. Moreover, with the Pfizer vaccine going from one regulatory success to another and increasingly dominating the Covid-19 vaccine market in both the United States and continental Europe (not to mention Israel, whose vaccination campaign has consisted almost exclusively of Pfizer), it is clear that what is really meant today by “Big Pharma” must be Pfizer and Pfizer alone. Following negative media coverage of adverse effects (in particular, thrombosis) and, in some cases, regulatory intervention on the part of national supervisory agencies, both of the other actual “Big Pharma” alternatives, AstraZeneca in the EU and Johnson & Johnson in the EU and the US, have been relegated to the status of bit players outside of the United Kingdom.

It would appear that in the West at least, we are moving toward a virtual Covid-19 vaccine monopoly for Pfizer. Even the Covid vaccine of Moderna – a company that famously had never brought a drug to market previously and hence that could hardly be described as “Big Pharma” – is increasingly coming under scrutiny for causing myocarditis in young males and its use is being restricted to people under 30 in a whole series of European countries. Pfizer, by contrast, has remained untouched. This even though myocarditis is a widely-reported and officially acknowledged adverse effect of both mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer, even though recent statistical analysis by the CDC, at any rate, found no “significant difference” in reported myocarditis between the two vaccines for males 18-25, and even though there is evidence that Moderna provides longer-lasting protection (the effectiveness of the vaccine even being twice that of Pfizer six months on, according to this recent study [p. 11]).

What greater proof of the inordinate power of “Big Pharma” – i.e. Pfizer – could there be? But if Pfizer did not rule the world two years ago, how did it come to rule the world today? Moreover, as many Americans will only have discovered when the FDA’s full approval of the “Pfizer” vaccine was given not to Pfizer, after all, but to BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH of Mainz, Germany, the actual developer of the so-called “Pfizer” vaccine is precisely Pfizer’s German partner BioNTech. This is already evident indeed from the codename of the vaccine: BNT162b2. Needless to say, “BNT” does not stand for Pfizer. The partnership agreement between the two firms likewise makes abundantly clear that BNT162b2 is BioNTech’s vaccine. Thus, apart from its own direct proceeds from sales of the vaccine, BioNTech receives “up to double-digit tiered royalty payments” from Pfizer on the latter’s sales of the vaccine in Pfizer’s assigned territories.

This is in addition to “$120 million in upfront, equity and near-term research payments and up to an additional $305 million in potential development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments”. (See BioNTech press release here.) BioNTech, incidentally, has a similar agreement with Fosun Pharma for commercializing its vaccine in China. Now, far from being “Big Pharma,” prior to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, BioNTech was still, in effect, a small, struggling start-up, which, like Moderna, had yet to bring a product to market. BioNTech’s own 2019 annual report filing to the SEC describes the company as follows: “We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company with no pharmaceutical products approved for commercial sale.”

The filing continues frankly, “We have incurred significant losses since our inception and we anticipate that we will continue to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future….” Thus, in the 2nd quarter of 2020, BioNTech had only 41.8 million euros in (non-product) revenues and losses of more than twice that amount (88.3 million euros). Thanks to its Covid-19 vaccine, however, one year later, in the 2nd quarter of 2021, its revenues had rocketed to 5.31 billion euros – a more than 100-fold increase! – of which over three-quarters (4 billion euros) is profit. As the economist Carsten Brzeski of the Dutch bank ING put it to Reuters, BioNTech had gone “from 0 to 100 in just a year.” BioNTech’s recently announced 3rd quarter results show estimated revenues of over 6 billion euros and gross profits of nearly 4.7 billion euros.

Always, as long as there’s money to be made.

• New Type Of Covid-19 Vaccine In The Works (RT)

A British company is moving towards phase 1 trials for its novel Covid-19 vaccine, which is applied as a skin patch and uses T-cells to fight back against the virus. In theory it offers longer-lasting protection. Speaking to The Guardian in an article published on Monday, Emergex Chief Commercial Officer Robin Cohen hailed the awarding of regulatory approval by Swiss authorities for allowing his Oxfordshire-based firm to push forward with the clinical trials. Cohen stated that it was the first time a regulator had approved a Covid-19 vaccine for clinical trials in which the vaccine’s sole purpose was to “generate a targeted T-cell response” rather than an antibody response.

While the antibody response, engendered by overcoming infection or the administration of one of the current cohorts of widely used vaccines, wanes over time, the Emergex skin patch could offer longer-lasting immunity – possibly for decades, according to Cohen. The COO claimed that the vaccine could be more effective too. Research published last week described a so-called “abortive infection” in which T-cells destroy the virus before it has the chance to settle in the body. However, Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, told the Guardian that a T-cell vaccine was unlikely to be capable of providing complete cover against the virus, suggesting it could be used to complement an existing vaccine that generates an antibody response.

Altmann noted that the Pfizer vaccine elicits a weaker T-cell response than the AstraZeneca shot, but the former is considered more effective against Covid-19. Emergex’s skin patch vaccine will start its trial on January 3 after the Swiss drugs regulator granted approval for the 26-person test. Interim results from the trial are expected in June with some participants receiving higher doses than others. Cohen added that the skin patch vaccine would not be available until 2025 at the earliest, noting the normal timeframe for vaccine development.

“I am deeply ashamed of our country and, as an Austrian, I am angry, sad and stunned at the same time.”

• Austria’s Greatest Olympian Quits Politics As Lockdown For Unvaxxed Starts (RT)

Austria’s most successful Olympian, Felix Gottwald, has accused the government of discriminating and dividing by introducing a strict lockdown for the unvaccinated, causing the country’s Sports Minister to defend the measures. As of Monday, around two million Austrians who have not yet received their Covid vaccinations have been thurst into the initial 10-day measures with their country facing a rise in cases and strains on its public health system. They have received permission to leave their homes only for work or food shopping, with police carrying out spot checks across public spaces to determine vaccination status and dish out fines ranging from €500 ($572) to €1,450 ($1,650) for anyone caught breaching protocol or refusing to comply. “We are not taking this step lightly but unfortunately it is necessary,” said Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg.

In an open letter voicing his disgust at the move, three-time Olympic and triple world champion Gottwald has resigned from his role as chairman for popular sports while denouncing “division, agitation, [and] discrimination”, which he claims are “the government imperatives of the hour”. “After nine official months in this function, I can say that there may be a lot going on in our country, but certainly not about the health and well-being of Austrians and the people living in Austria – and that in the midst of the greatest health crisis,” the Nordic combined all-time great continued. “I am deeply ashamed of our country and, as an Austrian, I am angry, sad and stunned at the same time.”

A self-professed “healthy person who uses sensible and sensible measures to contain the pandemic very responsibly”, Gottwald took aim at the Minister of Sports, Werner Kogler, and said that he “would have the power to set levers in motion that promote, rather than prevent, exercise and (popular) sport in what is probably the greatest health crisis of our time”, with the unvaccinated unable to partake in such activities. “As an athlete, I have learned to deal with defeat and failure, to learn from them, to develop myself further and to treat myself and others with respect and dignity. I am currently missing these virtues entirely on the part of politics,” he stated. As Gottwald thanked party members and the Bundes-Sport GmbH organization which he was a part of, he admitted that he accepted that he had “failed” in his duties and felt unable to “continue as if I wasn’t aware of the unsportsmanlike and unhealthy developments surrounding this pandemic”, which he said “is not an option for me.”

“A betrayal of the Nuremberg Code constitutes a crime against humanity.”

• Why Have We Doctors Been Silent? (Wilk)

I have watched as ‘the science’ has been presented on the national stage flanked by Union Jack flags as an unassailable truth. For something so apparently inviolable, it seems to shift and change disconcertingly from week to week, and for those of us looking beneath the pomp to the plain data, we see the rather unexciting (and unchanging) truth: the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, as it turns out, has a much lower infection fatality rate than early predictions. It is less deadly than the seasonal flu in children. The Office for National Statistics has reported the mean age of a Covid-attributed death in the UK to be 80.3 years, slightly older than deaths from other causes (78.2 years over the comparable time period).

What has been most upsetting for me has been the unquestioning compliance from the medical community as increasingly draconian, non-evidence-based and destructive virus control measures have been implemented. Some of the overt corruption, financial conflict of interests and politicisation has been laid bare in editorials in prominent medical journals such as the BMJ. But the vast majority of doctors have had no interest in asking questions or looking further. My concern over our professional passivity turned to alarm as our compliance required us to support the roll-out of an experimental vaccine to a trusting population. Contrary to the basic tenets of evidence-based medicine, pronouncing an experimental medical intervention ‘safe and effective’ now does not seem to require any peer-reviewed evidence of safety or clinically meaningful efficacy.

The vaccines have not been shown in clinical trials to reduce transmission, hospitalisation or death. The phase 3 trials are not over and the safety data is not complete; the earliest trials will run into 2023. The consent form for the Covid-19 vaccine does not disclose its status as an unlicensed experimental product. The risks remain largely unknown, although it is becoming clear that the vaccine has resulted in death or injury in a rising number of healthy people. A growing number of vaccine-induced syndromes are being recognised, including immune thrombotic thrombocytopaenia, myocarditis and menstrual irregularities, among many others being published in the literature. At the time of writing, there have been more than 380,000 reports, 1.2million injuries and 1,700 fatalities submitted under the MHRA Yellow Card scheme.

The Prime Minister himself has communicated the latest evidence, that two doses of the vaccine do not stop one contracting the virus, nor do they stop person-to-person transmission, they merely reduce the severity of symptoms. Despite this, it is clear the public are being subjected to a relentless media campaign of shame and coercion, that they must take this experimental product ‘for the greater good’ lest they be viewed as selfish cowards. A vaccine passport is now likely to be rolled out under ‘Plan B’, which proposes to return unlawfully usurped fundamental human rights and freedoms to only the vaccinated. Workers in the care home sector have had their livelihoods tethered to their compliance with the vaccine mandates, and a recent announcement confirms that this will soon include NHS employees. Not only is there no scientific basis for these mandates, these coercive actions breach the Nuremberg Code, as does the unprecedented lack of animal safety data for a novel medical product. A betrayal of the Nuremberg Code constitutes a crime against humanity.

“SCOTUS will concur with the 5th Circuit that this arbitrary edict is fatally flawed.”

• Biden’s Moribund Vaccine Mandate (AS)

The Biden administration will inevitably ask the Supreme Court to review last Friday’s decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to halt its vaccine mandate. The effort is likely to be futile, however. Writing for the appeals court, Judge Kurt Engelhardt confidently predicted that the mandate’s challengers “are likely to succeed on the merits” under judicial review. Engelhardt took particular exception to the attempt to impose the mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), pointing out that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and the nondelegation doctrine preclude OSHA from making such “sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.”

The decision also declared the mandate “fatally flawed on its own terms,” emphasizing that it purports to “save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a ‘grave danger’ in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat.” This seriously undermined the administration’s claim that the purpose of the mandate is a response to a genuine national emergency: “The underinclusive nature of the Mandate implies that the Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary.” This created questions concerning OSHA’s use of the emergency temporary standard (ETS):

As the name suggests, emergency temporary standards “are an ‘unusual response’ to ‘exceptional circumstances.’” Thus, courts have uniformly observed that OSHA’s authority to establish emergency temporary standards under § 655(c) “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’” But the Mandate at issue here … is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly “grave danger” the Mandate purports to address.

The appeals court goes on to point out that President Biden and OSHA have both undermined the legitimacy of the mandate by contradicting their own prior positions concerning the need to impose such a measure. Judge Engelhardt quotes Biden’s answer to a question posed to him on December 4 of last year concerning whether vaccines should be mandatory: “No, I don’t think [they] should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory…” The judge also quotes a D.C. Circuit Brief filed by OSHA in May of 2020: “Based on substantial evidence … an ETS is not necessary both because there are existing OSHA and non-OSHA standards that address COVID-19 and because an ETS would actually be counterproductive.”

“..47% [..] at day 121..”

• Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccination Up to 9 Months (Lancet PP)

Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted using Swedish nationwide registries. The cohort comprised 842,974 pairs (N=1,684,958), including individuals vaccinated with 2 doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, mRNA-1273, or BNT162b2, and matched unvaccinated individuals. Cases of symptomatic infection and severe Covid-19 (hospitalization or 30-day mortality after confirmed infection) were collected from 12 January to 4 October 2021.

Findings: Vaccine effectiveness of BNT162b2 against infection waned progressively from 92% (95% CI, 92-93, P<0·001) at day 15-30 to 47% (95% CI, 39-55, P<0·001) at day 121-180, and from day 211 and onwards no effectiveness could be detected (23%; 95% CI, -2-41, P=0·07). The effectiveness waned slightly slower for mRNA-1273, being estimated to 59% (95% CI, 18-79) from day 181 and onwards. In contrast, effectiveness of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 was generally lower and waned faster, with no effectiveness detected from day 121 and onwards (-19%, 95% CI, -97-28), whereas effectiveness from heterologous ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 / mRNA was maintained from 121 days and onwards (66%; 95% CI, 41-80). Overall, vaccine effectiveness was lower and waned faster among men and older individuals. For the outcome severe Covid-19, effectiveness waned from 89% (95% CI, 82-93, P<0·001) at day 15-30 to 42% (95% CI, -35-75, P=0·21) from day 181 and onwards, with sensitivity analyses showing notable waning among men, older frail individuals, and individuals with comorbidities.

Interpretation: Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic Covid-19 infection wanes progressively over time across all subgroups, but at different rate according to type of vaccine, and faster for men and older frail individuals. The effectiveness against severe illness seems to remain high through 9 months, although not for men, older frail individuals, and individuals with comorbidities. This strengthens the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third booster dose.

“Gibraltar; the most vaccinated region on Earth (100% fully vaccinated, 40% boosted) has now cancelled Christmas due to “exponential” rise in cases.”

• Gibraltar Cancels Christmas Celebrations Amid Covid Spike (Exp.)

While the government has called upon the public to “exercise their own judgement”, they have “strongly” advised against any social events for at least the next four weeks, discouraging people from holding private Christmas events. Gibraltar has seen a steady increase in active cases of COVID-19 throughout October and November, which has gained pace over the past few days. Health Minister, the Hon Samantha Sacramento, described the increase in case numbers as “drastic”, encouraging people to come forward to receive their booster vaccine. The government has advised members of the public to wear masks, avoid large gatherings and maintain social distancing. They also advised people to “conduct themselves in a cautious and sensible manner”, reminding the public that “we are still in a global pandemic and that people are losing their lives every day all over the world.”

Gibraltar has seen an average of 47 cases per day over the last seven days. The country saw 124 new cases appear over the weekend, taking the number of active cases to 474. Ms Sacramento said: “The drastic increase in the numbers of people testing positive for COVID-19 in recent days is a stark reminder that the virus is still very prevalent in our community and that it is the responsibility of us all to take every reasonable precaution to protect ourselves and our loved ones. “The vaccination programme for 12 to 15-year-olds and the booster vaccination programme are now underway, and Gibraltar received 4680 more doses this week. “Everyone who is eligible for a vaccine or a booster is strongly encouraged to take up the offer when they are called.”

Cheaper by the dozen?

• Brits Will Need 3 Jabs to Be Considered ‘Fully Vaccinated’ -PM (ET)

People will need to have COVID-19 booster shots on top of the original two doses to be considered “fully vaccinated” in the UK, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday. At a Downing Street press briefing, Johnson said the concept of what constitutes “full vaccination” will need to be adjusted. “On boosters, it’s very clear that getting three jabs—getting your booster—will become an important fact and it will make life easier for you in all sorts of ways, and we will have to adjust our concept of what constitutes a full vaccination to take account of that,” he said. “As we can see from what’s happening, the two jabs sadly do start to wane, so we’ve got to be responsible and we’ve got to reflect that fact in the way we measure what constitutes full vaccination.”

Johnson said the government will be making plans to add the booster to the digital COVID-19 passport issued by the National Health Service. The prime minister urged people to get the booster jab as soon as they are eligible. “It would be an utter tragedy if, after everything we have been through, people who had done the right thing by getting double vaccinated ended up becoming seriously ill or even losing their lives because they allowed their immunity to wane,” he said. Earlier on Monday, the UK government accepted the advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) to extend the booster vaccine programme to include people aged 40 to 49. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: “We know immunity to COVID-19 begins to wane after six months and new data published today shows a third dose boosts protection against symptomatic infection to more than 90 percent—this highlights just how important it is that everyone eligible gets their top-up jabs as soon as possible.”

Not Kirsch’s strongest outing. But I guess it’s not his fault that a previous piece on Newsom is his most viewed yet.

• Gavin Newsom Is Lying About His Vaccine Injury And Now I Can Prove It (Kirsch)

Recently, I wrote a very popular article about Gavin Newsom being vaccine injured. It got over 250K views, my most popular article so far. As expected, Newsom denied it: Naturally, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Newsweek immediately “fact checked” my article and deemed it to be false. Of course, none of them could explain why Newsom was a no-show at the UN Climate summit via Zoom. Not even for 5 minutes via Zoom!?! Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Not a very thorough fact check. And none of the organizations analyzed the before and after Newsom videos either by asking a prominent neurologist for their opinion. I guess it is hard to find competent help in the fact checking department nowadays.

Not only was Newsom himself vaccine injured and deliberately covered it up, but I found out that his kids aren’t vaccinated either. Want to know why? Because his wife is smart: she knows that vaccines are dangerous. She doesn’t want his kids to be vaccine injured. And she’s right! Good for her. Bravo! But Gavin’s stance is horrible. He’s not just suggesting how you should care for your kids. The governor is dictating medical treatment for your kids based on what he believes. But for his own kids? No way are they going to get vaccinated. He said, “Public or private, they have to be vaccinated.” I don’t have a problem with Gavin recommending vaccination. Everyone makes mistakes. But he has no right to force your child to do what he wants even if the vaccine was perfectly safe (which it isn’t). And it’s hypocritical to force you to vaccinate your kids when he won’t vaccinate his own kids.

[..] Here’s how I am going to prove to the world I’m right: Gavin, I’m willing to bet you $1M that I’m right about you being vaccine injured and that you are lying about the injury and covering it up. We don’t have to drag your kids into it. Will you take my bet? All I need is for you to disclose the names of all doctors who were involved in any way in your vaccine injury treatment within 21 days of the booster and an order from you demanding that all of these doctors disclose to me any and all vaccine-related conversations, emails, notes, and/or medical records regarding you and your vaccine side effects in the 21 days after you got your booster and give me permission to disclose that information publicly. That’s it. Easy peasy. If you were telling the truth, you have absolutely nothing to lose. You will provide no list of doctors and your doctors will not be able to tell me anything since there is nothing to tell and no records to produce! There will be nothing to disclose.

“..waning to the point where booster doses will become “essential” for everyone.”

• Fauci, Gates Admit COVID Vaccines Don’t Work as Advertised (CHD)

In two recent interviews, pandemic thought leaders Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates drastically changed their opinions on COVID vaccine effectiveness — and used their newfound concerns to push booster shots for the general population. Last week, in an interview with Jeremy Hunt at London’s Policy Exchange, Gates admitted what many, including the Lancet, have been saying for months — that the vaccines aren’t effective. Gates, who previously referred to the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines as “magic,” told Hunt “we need a new way of doing the vaccines.” Only days later, Fauci echoed similar sentiments during a New York Times podcast. Fauci said the COVID vaccine’s effectiveness against infection, hospitalization and even death, for all age groups, is waning to the point where booster doses will become “essential” for everyone.

Fauci said: “I think the boosting is going to be an absolutely essential component of our response, not a bonus, not a luxury, but an absolute essential part of the program.” Fauci said authorities are observing vaccine waning “involving all age groups.” Making his case for a wider booster program, he told The Times the vaccines are “waning to the point that you’re seeing more and more people getting breakthrough infections, and more and more of those people who are getting breakthrough infections are winding up in the hospital.” Today in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson similarly spoke of widening the UK’s COVID booster program.

“Getting three jabs or getting your booster will become an important fact … We will have to adjust our concept of what constitutes a full vaccination,” he told Britans. The mainstream media also is priming the public for an unknown number of additional COVID shots. Sunday, Bloomberg reported: “It may turn out that the term ‘booster’ is a bit of a misnomer, and that the correct number of shots for maximum efficacy isn’t yet known.” If Gates and Fauci coordinated their latest COVID vaccine messaging, to manufacture consent for wider uptake of COVID vaccines through booster programs, it wouldn’t be the first time the two have collaborated closely on vaccines.

“We’re the mightiest military on the face of the earth..”

You sure?

• 160,000 US Military Families Struggling With Food Insecurity (JTN)

At least 160,000 active-duty military members are struggling to feed their families, according to Feeding America, which coordinates over 200 food banks across the country. It is unknown what the exact scope of the issue is, as there have been no formal studies. But activists say it has continued for years, mostly with junior-level enlisted service members — ranks E1 to E4 in military parlance — who have children, The Associated Press reported. “It’s a shocking truth that’s known to many food banks across the United States,” said Feeding America’s government relations officer, Vince Hall. “This should be the cause of deep embarrassment.” During the previous year, 29% of military members faced food insecurity, according to an estimate by Feeding America.

Junior enlisted ranks receive modest pay and have to frequently move, making it difficult for their spouses to maintain a job, the AP reported. There is a significant network of military-adjacent charitable organizations, like Blue Star Families and the Armed Services YMCA, that have created an infrastructure of food banks near the majoriy of most domestic bases. Military families living outside of base grounds receive a Basic Allowance for Housing to help cover the majority of their costs. But the 2008 Food and Nutrition Act counts the allowance as income when calculating food stamps eligibility, which results in disqualifying thousands of military families. However, the allowance does not count as income with WIC benefits for mothers and children or for tax reasons.

“It’s one of these things that the American people don’t know about, but it’s a matter of course among military members. We know this,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a former Blackhawk pilot who lost both of her legs in a helicopter crash in Iraq. “We’re the mightiest military on the face of the earth and yet those who are on the lower rung of our military ranks are — if they are married and have a child or two– they’re hungry. How can you focus on carrying out the mission and defending our democracy. If you’re worried about whether or not your kid gets dinner tonight?”

How do you reveal what you don’t know?

• Bitcoin’s Mysterious Inventor May Be Revealed In Court (RT)

The true identity of bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, who has been one of the financial world’s enduring mysteries, could be finally unveiled in a Florida court, the Wall Street Journal reports.According to the media, a lawsuit is currently underway where the family of deceased man David Kleiman is suing his former business partner Craig Wright over control of their shared assets. The assets in question are a cache of about one million bitcoins (worth over $64 billion), belonging to bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright, a 51-year-old Australian programmer living in London, has been making statements since 2016 saying he created bitcoin. Those claims, however, have been strongly criticized and dismissed by most of the bitcoin community.

The family reportedly plans to provide evidence that Wright and Kleiman worked together since the cryptocurrency’s inception. “We believe the evidence will show there was a partnership to create and mine over one million bitcoins,” Kleiman family lawyer Vel Freedman told the WSJ. The defense aims to prove that Wright is the sole creator of bitcoin. “We believe the court will find there’s nothing to indicate or record that they were in a partnership,” Wright’s lawyer said. Some cryptocurrency experts still remain skeptical about whether Wright or Kleiman actually had the knowledge needed to create the world’s most prominent crypto token.

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for the author of the white paper titled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ in 2008, remains a mystery. Various theories have emerged but to date nobody knows who Nakamoto is. One of the most celebrated candidates was a 64-year-old Japanese-American engineer from California named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2014, he became the subject of an extensive Newsweek magazine report which purported to identify bitcoin’s inventor. The man, however, has denied any involvement with cryptocurrency.

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime; donate with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

Debt Rattle August 15 2019

Aug 152019

August 15, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:21 am Finance Tagged with: arctic, Brexit, China, Corbyn, Epstein, Ghislaine, Gibraltar, Good Friday, Hong Kong, paper tiger, plastics, recession, trade deal, Trump, yield curve 5 Responses »

Henri Matisse The terrace, St. Tropez 1904

• US Yield Curve Inversion Highlights Recession Fears, Fed Dilemma (R.)

• China: Paper Tiger (Jim Rickards)

• Trade Wars and the Over-Valued Dollar (Hill)

• Trump Ties China Trade Deal To ‘Humane’ Hong Kong Resolution (R.)

• Autopsy Finds Jeffrey Epstein Had Several Broken Neck Bones (NYPost)

• Jeffrey Epstein’s Body Claimed By Unidentified ‘Associate’ (NBC)

• CEO Scott Borgerson Denies He’s Dating Epstein Pal Ghislaine Maxwell (NYPost)

• UK Labour Vows To Bring Down PM Johnson And Delay Brexit (R.)

• No Chance Of US-UK Deal If Northern Ireland Peace At Risk – Pelosi (G.)

• Half of UK Farms Could Fail After No-Deal Brexit – Report (G.)

• Gibraltar To Release Iranian Oil Tanker On Thursday (R.)

• Scientists Find Micro Plastics Deep in Arctic Ice (R.)

It takes on average 18 months from a US yield-curve inversion to a recession.

• US Yield Curve Inversion Highlights Recession Fears, Fed Dilemma (R.)

When the U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates last month for the first time in more than a decade, it signaled that further reductions in borrowing costs might not be needed. Bond markets vehemently disagree. Sliding bond yields and the inversion of a key part of the U.S. yield curve on Wednesday for the first time in 12 years show that bond investors have a far gloomier outlook for the U.S. and global economies than the U.S. central bank. “The rates market rarely lies and globally it looks like it’s expecting a day of reckoning,” said Tom di Galoma, a managing director at Seaport Global Holdings in New York.

Fears are also rising the Fed may not only be behind the curve in cutting rates, but that central banks may be running out of ammunition to stimulate growth as countries offset each other’s attempts to boost growth with looser fiscal policy. Worsening economic data, weak inflationary pressures, the escalating U.S.-China trade war and intensifying tensions between protesters in Hong Kong and the Chinese government have boosted demand for safe-haven debt, sending many European government bond yields deeper into negative territory while the longest-dated U.S. Treasury yields have fallen to record lows. The inversion of key parts of the Treasury yield curve, in which investors in short-term holdings get paid more than those in long-term ones, has historically been a reliable indicator of a coming recession.

On Wednesday, the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury note tipped 2.1 basis points below 2-year Treasury yields, the first time this spread has been negative since 2007, according to Refinitiv data. The inversion rattled investors already worried that a U.S.-China trade war might trigger a global recession and kill off a decade-long bull market on Wall Street. Major U.S. stock indexes were down about 2%.

“The new “Cold War” is here. Get used to it.”

• China: Paper Tiger (Jim Rickards)

[..] at $11,000 per capita GDP, China is stuck squarely in the “middle income trap” as defined by development economists. The path from low income (about $5,000 per capita) to middle-income (about $10,000 per capita) is fairly straightforward and mostly involves reduced corruption, direct foreign investment and migration from the countryside to cities to purse assembly-style jobs. The path from middle-income to high-income (about $20,000 per capita) is much more difficult and involves creation and deployment of high-technology and manufacture of high-value-added goods. Among developing economies (excluding oil producers), only Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have successfully made this transition since World War II.

All other developing economies in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East including giants such as Brazil and Turkey remain stuck in the middle-income ranks. China remains reliant on assembly-style jobs and has shown no promise of breaking into the high-income ranks. In short, and despite enormous annual growth in the past twenty years, China remains fundamentally a poor country with limited ability to improve the well-being of its citizens much beyond what has already been achieved. [..] Trade wars with the U.S. are escalating, not diminishing as I warned from the start in early 2018.

Trump’s recent imposition of 10% tariffs on the remaining $300 billion of Chinese imports not currently tariffed (in addition to existing tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese imports) will slow the Chinese economy even further. China retaliated with a shock devaluation of the yuan below 7.00 to one dollar, a level that had previously been defended by the People’s Bank of China. Resorting to a currency war weapon to fight a trade war shows just how badly China is losing the trade war. But, this currency war counterattack will not be successful because it will incite more capital outflows from China.

The Chinese lost $1 trillion of hard currency reserves during the last round of capital flight (2014-2016) and will lose more now, despite tighter capital controls. The spike of bitcoin to $11,000 following the China devaluation is a symptom of Chinese people using bitcoin to avoid capital controls and get their money out of China. [..] lurking behind all of this is the coming debt crisis in China. About 25% of China’s reported growth the past ten years has come from wasted infrastructure investment (think “ghost cities”) funded with unpayable debt. China’s economy is a Ponzi scheme like the Madoff Plan and that debt pyramid is set to collapse.

From last week, but a good reminder that different rules apply to the reserve currency.

• Trade Wars and the Over-Valued Dollar (Hill)

President Trump and China are at it again—and both just upped the ante. Currency manipulation and an overvalued U.S. dollar have taken center stage in the news, thanks to Beijing devaluing its currency [last] Monday. Trump’s Treasury Department has countered by naming China a “currency manipulator.” But boiling the problem down to currency manipulation means the administration is fighting a previous war. And that highlights why the president lacks the strategic vision needed to keep up with newer global challenges. America’s trade problems have grown far more broad in recent years. Chronic global trade imbalances threaten the stability of the world economy. And that holds true whether these disruptions are caused by currency manipulation, trade barriers or global capital flows.

Designating China as a “currency manipulator” is long overdue. But it’s hardly a cure-all. It merely initiates consultations with the IMF. And it doesn’t necessarily provide leverage to solve core trade issues. What’s needed is an approach that addresses the fundamental causes of current trade imbalances. The problem does start with China, however, since Beijing just weakened its currency, the yuan, to its lowest level since 2008. This will likely neutralize the impact of new tariffs that the president announced in a tweet last week. China allowed its currency to fall by 2 percent in a mere 24 hours. That’s a significant drop, following an overall 11.4 percent decline since March of 2018.

Weakening the value of the yuan lowers the cost of Chinese goods in the U.S. market. And so, even though the president is attempting to raise the cost of imports through his new tariffs, their sticker price could still shrink. In the wider picture, Trump’s condo-selling mindset – in which he simply imposes more tariffs until Beijing agrees to a “deal” – is a poor means to address global trade imbalances. It’s not China’s intransigence that is overwhelming U.S. manufacturers; it’s an overvalued U.S dollar. There’s no doubt that China has long used predatory trade practices, such as dumping and illegal subsidies, to undercut U.S. manufacturers.

And Beijing has repeatedly intervened in currency markets to suppress the value of its currency—all to continue its job-killing trade surpluses with the United States. But China isn’t the only country that has played the currency game. Over the past two decades, Japan, South Korea and nearly 20 other countries in Asia and Europe have also bid up the price of the U.S. dollar to subsidize their own exports. And that has made U.S. goods increasingly uncompetitive in global markets—with the United States shedding five million manufacturing jobs and nearly 90,000 domestic factories in that time.

Can the US sit still in case China invades Hong Kong? And what would such an invasion mean for the city’s status as a trade hub?

• Trump Ties China Trade Deal To ‘Humane’ Hong Kong Resolution (R.)

President Donald Trump on Wednesday tied a U.S. trade deal with China to humane resolution of the weeks of protests wracking Hong Kong, hours after the State Department said it was “deeply concerned” about reports of movement of Chinese paramilitary forces along the Hong Kong border. The State Department warned that continued erosion of the territory’s autonomy put at risk the preferential status it enjoys under U.S. law. Trump, in his remarks on Twitter, appeared to suggest a personal meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to help resolve the crisis. “Of course China wants to make a deal. Let them work humanely with Hong Kong first!” Trump said on Twitter. “I have ZERO doubt that if President Xi wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it. Personal meeting?”

Trump, who has been seeking a major deal to correct trade imbalances with China ahead of his 2020 reelection bid, has faced mounting criticism from Congress and elsewhere for not taking a stronger public line on Hong Kong and for his characterization of the protests earlier this month as “riots” that were a matter for China to deal with. In his tweets on Wednesday, Trump also said that his delay in 10% tariffs on more than $150 billion in Chinese imports to Dec. 15 from Sept. 1 “will be reciprocated” by China and the “much good will come from the short deferral to December.” His comment appeared to contradict senior officials in his administration, who said earlier that no concessions were made by Beijing in response to the delay announced on Tuesday.

“..more common in strangulation murders than suicidal hangings..”

• Autopsy Finds Jeffrey Epstein Had Several Broken Neck Bones (NYPost)

Jeffrey Epstein’s autopsy determined the convicted pedophile suffered multiple broken neck bones, according to a report. One of Epstein’s breaks was to the hyoid bone, an injury that experts told the Washington Post is more common in homicide victims. The discoveries were disclosed to the paper by two people familiar with the findings of the autopsy, which was completed on Sunday, but warranted more information by the Medical Examiner’s Office before they make a final cause of death ruling. “Today, a medical examiner performed the autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson in a statement Sunday night.

“The ME’s determination is pending further information at this time. At the request of those representing the decedent, and with the awareness of the federal prosecutor, I allowed a private pathologist (Dr. Michael Baden) to observe the autopsy examination. This is routine practice.” Epstein was found dead of an apparent suicide in his cell at the Manhattan Correctional Center early Saturday. He was being held there without bail since his July arrest on sex trafficking charges. The Washington Post spoke to Jonathan Arden, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, who said a broken hyoid bone — which is near the Adam’s apple — is more common in strangulation murders than suicidal hangings.

“If, hypothetically, the hyoid bone is broken, that would generally raise questions about strangulation, but it is not definitive and does not exclude suicidal hanging,” said Arden, who is not involved with the Epstein autopsy. Numerous studies were also cited by the paper that found hyoid bone breaks were found in the minority of suicidal hangings. One such study conducted from 2010 to 2013 that looked at suicidal hangings in India found that hyoid damage was present in just 16 of 264 cases.

Bill Barr better get a grip on this. It’s turning into an absurdity.

• Jeffrey Epstein’s Body Claimed By Unidentified ‘Associate’ (NBC)

Jeffrey Epstein’s body has been claimed from the New York City medical examiner’s office, a source close to the investigation told NBC News on Wednesday. Epstein, 66, was found dead by apparent suicide Saturday morning in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. The center’s warden has been temporarily reassigned, and the two guards assigned to watch Epstein have been placed on leave. Epstein wasn’t on suicide watch at the time of his death, multiple people familiar with the investigation have told NBC News. Attorney General William Barr has said that he was “appalled” by the development and that he has consulted with the Justice Department’s inspector general, who is also investigating. The person who claimed Epstein’s body was described only as an “Epstein associate.”

After Epstein was arrested last month on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors, his attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Richard Berman to allow Epstein to post bond secured by a mortgage on his home in Manhattan. According to court documents, they said the bond would have been co-secured by his brother, Mark Epstein, and a friend identified as David Mitchell. Berman denied bond on July 18. About a week later, Epstein was found injured and in a fetal position in his cell, raising questions at the time of whether he had tried to kill himself. On Monday, Berman complained in a letter to the warden, Lamine N’Diaye, that the federal Bureau of Prisons still hasn’t explained what he called the July “incident.”

In a response later Monday, N’Diaye said that an internal investigation was completed on July 23 but that she couldn’t reveal any information because of the investigations into Epstein’s death on Saturday. On Tuesday, Justice Department officials confirmed that N’Diaye had been reassigned.

Painting said to be hanging in Epstein townhouse

“..a property manager of an adjacent parcel of land said that Maxwell was living at Borgerson’s residence as recently as two weeks ago…”

• CEO Scott Borgerson Denies He’s Dating Epstein Pal Ghislaine Maxwell (NYPost)

The man rumored to be dating Jeffrey Epstein’s former lover and alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell has completely denied any romance between the pair. Maxwell has been reportedly living with tech CEO Scott Borgerson at his Manchester, Massachusetts home, according to the Daily Mail. But Borgerson called The Post Wednesday to insist he had been busy working abroad – and nobody has been at his home. He arrived back in the US late Wednesday, only to be met by a police escort, and said: “It’s pretty crazy, all of this just exploded. People keep asking me, but I am not dating Ghislaine, I’m home alone with my cat.” When asked about the status of his friendship with Maxwell now, Borgerson replied: “I don’t want to comment on that – would you want to talk about your friends?”

“I landed after a long flight and my phone went crazy, the first thing I did was call the local police to check my house.” Asked if he knew where Maxwell now is, Borgerson, a divorced dad, replied: “She’s not here, I have no idea where she is. “Nobody wants to be close to this radioactive situation.[..] The Post has been told that friends of Maxwell last saw her over the past month walking down a London street, but she has gone to ground. Borgerson refused to say whether Maxwell had ever stayed at his home. Despite this, NBC News reported on Wednesday that a property manager of an adjacent parcel of land said that Maxwell was living at Borgerson’s residence as recently as two weeks ago.

Corbyn wants to be PM. But not a lot of MPs like him.

• UK Labour Vows To Bring Down PM Johnson And Delay Brexit (R.)

The Labour Party has urged rebel MPs in the ruling Conservatives to help block a no-deal Brexit by bringing down Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration and allowing its leader Jeremy Corbyn to form a caretaker government. Johnson has promised to take Britain out of the European Union by Oct. 31, with or without a deal, setting the scene for a showdown in parliament where MPs are opposed to a divorce without a transition agreement. In a letter to opposition party leaders and several senior Conservatives opposed to a disorderly exit, Corbyn said his “strictly time-limited temporary government” would delay Brexit and hold a general election.

He said Labour would campaign in the election to hold a second referendum on the Brexit terms, including an option as to whether the country should remain in the bloc three years after it voted to leave. “This government has no mandate for No Deal, and the 2016 EU referendum provided no mandate for No Deal,” Corbyn said. “I therefore intend to table a vote of no confidence at the earliest opportunity when we can be confident of success.” A spokeswoman for Johnson’s Downing Street office said the choice was clear: “This government believes the people are the masters and votes should be respected, Jeremy Corbyn believes that the people are the servants and politicians can cancel public votes they don’t like.”

Why is it Bolton who’s talking trade deals?

• No Chance Of US-UK Deal If Northern Ireland Peace At Risk – Pelosi (G.)

There is no chance of Congress approving a US-UK trade agreement if Brexit undermines the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has said. Pelosi was restating the entrenched position of congressional Democrats and many Republicans in the wake of remarks made by Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, during a visit to London this week. Bolton had said that Britain and the US could sign interim, partial free trade deals, one sector at a time, which would go through the a fast track legislative process, to help the UK cope economically if there is a no-deal Brexit on 31 October.

In a statement on Wednesday, the House speaker, who commands a Democratic majority, warned that the Trump administration would not be able to sidestep congressional approval. “Whatever form it takes, Brexit cannot be allowed to imperil the Good Friday agreement, including the seamless border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, especially now, as the first generation born into the hope of Good Friday 21 years ago comes into adulthood.” Pelosi said. “We cannot go back.” Bolton said the sectoral deals, focusing on industries such as car manufacturing, could be negotiated quickly, and insisted they would receive overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.

“The ultimate end result is a comprehensive trade agreement covering all trading goods and services,” he said after meeting Boris Johnson and senior British officials on Monday. “But to get to that you could do it sector by sector, and you can do it in a modular fashion. In other words, you can carve out some areas where it might be possible to reach a bilateral agreement very quickly, very straightforwardly.”

Most heavily subsidized.

• Half of UK Farms Could Fail After No-Deal Brexit – Report (G.)

Campaigners for a second referendum are herding a flock of sheep down Whitehall to protest against the impact a no-deal Brexit could have on the farming community. According to a new report commissioned by the supporters of second poll, more than half of UK farms could go out of business if Britain crashes out of the EU on 31 October. Backed by the People’s Vote campaign and written by Dr Séan Rickard, former chief economist of the National Farmers’ Union, the report warns that 50% of farms could go under as the government would prioritise keeping down food prices for consumers ahead of protecting agricultural producers. To coincide with the report and launch of the Farmers for a People’s Vote group, campaigners are taking a small flock of sheep past the Cabinet Office where no-deal planning is taking place.

The report says the EU and all the countries with whom it has free-trade agreements would immediately apply tariffs and non-tariff barriers on food imports from the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit. At the same time, UK tariffs on imports would be slashed or reduced to nothing. It argues: “The combination of the removal of support payments – only a proportion will be made up by enhanced environmental payments – and an adverse trading environment will render the majority of farm businesses unviable. By the mid-2020s a large proportion of farm businesses – 50% or more is not an unreasonable estimate – recognising that they face an unprofitable future will decide to cease trading.”

[..] In the event of a no deal Brexit, Rickard argued that many industries would suffer but agriculture would feel the most serious economic shock. “It is impossible to project the exact number of farmers who will go out of business”, he said. “What we do know is that over 40% of them will have no net income if the basic payment is removed. If at the same time the government removes all tariffs and so depresses prices, these two factors combined will render over 50% of farms in this country unviable. “The possibility of any compensation from the government going anywhere near offsetting this is remote because so many promises have been made to so many other sectors and not all can be fulfilled.”

Bolton gone wrong.

• Gibraltar To Release Iranian Oil Tanker On Thursday (R.)

The British territory of Gibraltar will on Thursday release an Iranian oil tanker seized by Royal Marines in the Mediterranean in July, the Sun newspaper reported, citing sources close to Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo. Picardo would not apply to renew an order to detain Grace 1, the report said, adding that he is now satisfied that the oil tanker is no longer heading to Syria. Britain had said the vessel was violating European sanctions by taking oil to Syria, a charge Iran denies. “There is no reason to keep Grace 1 in Gibraltar a moment longer if we no longer believe it is in breach of sanctions against the Syrian regime,” the newspaper quoted a source close to Picardo as saying.

Everywhere. Literally. If it’s deep in Arctic ice, it’s deep inside you too.

• Scientists Find Micro Plastics Deep In Arctic Ice (R.)

Tiny pieces of plastic have been found in ice cores drilled in the Arctic by a U.S.-led team of scientists, underscoring the threat the growing form of pollution poses to marine life in even the remotest waters on the planet. The researchers used a helicopter to land on ice floes and retrieve the samples during an 18-day icebreaker expedition through the Northwest Passage, the hazardous route linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. “We had spent weeks looking out at what looks so much like pristine white sea ice floating out on the ocean,” said Jacob Strock, a graduate student researcher at the University of Rhode Island, who conducted an initial onboard analysis of the cores.

Microplastic found in ice core samples taken from the Northwest Passage. Northwest Passage Project/Camera: Duncan Clark via REUTERS

“When we look at it up close and we see that it’s all very, very visibly contaminated when you look at it with the right tools — it felt a little bit like a punch in the gut,” Strock told Reuters by telephone on Wednesday. Strock and his colleagues found the material trapped in ice taken from Lancaster Sound, an isolated stretch of water in the Canadian Arctic, which they had assumed might be relatively sheltered from drifting plastic pollution. The team drew 18 ice cores of up to 2 meters (6.5 feet) long from four locations and saw visible plastic beads and filaments of various shapes and sizes. “The plastic just jumped out in both its abundance and its scale,” said Brice Loose, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island and chief scientist of the expedition, known as the Northwest Passage Project.

Swaying in the underwater current like colorful corals, thousands of plastic bags were found on the Aegean seabed pic.twitter.com/5VJWEBHYWu

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) August 15, 2019

Debt Rattle July 21 2019

Jul 212019

July 21, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: Bolton, Boris, Brexit, Gibraltar, Iran, Mueller, Oman, profiteers, tanker, Trump, Twitter 6 Responses »

Buzz Aldrin photographed by Neil Armstrong, who’s reflected in his visor

• The Ham of Fate (Fintan O’Toole)

• Brexit, or Project Fear (Lis)

• The Story Began With UK’s Seizure Of Iranian-Flagged Ship In Gibraltar (O.)

• Bolton Lured Britain Into A Dangerous Trap To Punish Iran (G.)

• British Letter to UN Says Iran Approached Tanker In Omani Waters (R.)

• Britain Mulls Sanctions In Response To Iran Tanker Seizure (R.)

• UK Too Weak To Address Strategic Threats, Warns MP Committee (O.)

• Twitter Blocks Accounts Of Iranian State Media Outlets (AFP)

• Mueller Should Be Arrested For Conspiracy To Overthrow Trump (PCR)

• Are Libertarians the New Neocons? (Daniel McAdams)

• War Profiteers and the Demise of the US Military-Industrial Complex (Orlov)

• Final Voyage (Kunstler)

A lot about Britain today, with a new PM being announced on Tuesday and taking over from Theresa May on Wednesday. And that at a point in time when the country has committed its biggest international blunder in years (though competition’s stiff) with the seizure of an Iranian oil tanker two weeks ago.

• The Ham of Fate (Fintan O’Toole)

The Leave campaign that Johnson led to a stunning victory in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 owed much of its success to its carefully calibrated slogan “Take Back Control.” Akrasia, which is discussed in depth by Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, is the contrary of control. It means literally “not being in command of oneself” and is translated variously as “weakness of will,” “incontinence,” and “loss of self-control.” To Aristotle, an akratic is a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite. This is not just, as he himself seems to have intuited, Boris Johnson to a tee. It is also the reason why he embodies more than anyone else a Brexit project in which the very people who promised to take back control are utterly incapable of exercising it, even over themselves.

To grasp how Johnson’s akratic character has brought his country to a state approaching anarchy, it is necessary to return to the days immediately before February 21, 2016, when he announced to an expectant throng of journalists that he would support the Leave campaign. This was a crucial moment—polls have since shown that, in what turned out to be a very close-run referendum, Boris, as the mayor of London had branded himself, had a greater influence on voters than anyone else. “Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree,” writes Johnson in The Churchill Factor, his 2014 book about Winston Churchill, which carries the telling subtitle “How One Man Made History.”

While the book shows Johnson to be a true believer in the Great Man theory of history, his own moment of destiny plays it out as farce, the fate of a nation turning not on Churchillian resolution but on Johnsonian indecision. For Johnson was, in his own words, “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley.” On Saturday, February 20, he texted Prime Minister David Cameron to say he was going to advocate for Brexit. A few hours later, he texted again to say that he might change his mind and back Remain. Sometime between then and the following day, he wrote at least two different columns for the Daily Telegraph—his deadline was looming, so he wrote one passionately arguing for Leave and one arguing that the cost of Brexit would be too high. (Asked once if he had any convictions, Johnson replied, “Only one—for speeding…”)

Nothing wrong with leaving the EU, but everything wrong with how it’s been executed.

• Brexit, or Project Fear (Lis)

If, during the 2016 referendum campaign, you had told voters that MPs would be scrambling to stop the prime minister shutting down the legislature in order to force through food shortages, mass job losses and a crash in the pound, someone might have needed to change the slogan on the side of that bus. What is happening right now in Britain goes beyond any previously conceivable limits of responsible or accountable governance. Viewed against the country which seemed to exist just a few years ago, it is quite literally unbelievable. It’s not just that Brexit is a case of “I told you so”: the harm to our national political fabric has been more catastrophic than even the most pessimistic Remainer could have contemplated.

Britain is now heading into immediate, unabated crisis, but the consequences could last for years or even decades. Even the most conservative estimates suggest damage to our economy in all circumstances if we leave, contrary to everything campaigners promised. The neutral Office for Budget Responsibility this week forecast a significant recession in the event of no-deal. But the economic damage will almost certainly take less time to repair than the damage to our politics and society. What was billed as a way for people to take back control of democracy has become a systematic attack on every institution which underpins it.

First the Brexiters came for political opponents. Any prominent Remainer who dared question the legitimacy of the referendum or, heaven forbid, suggested a new one in the light of changed circumstances, was branded a traitor, an enemy of democracy, an elitist, a Remoaner, someone who wanted to subvert the will of the people, someone who knew best, someone who hated Britain. It was devastatingly effective. Brexit’s leaders rapidly and comprehensively refigured democratic opposition as opposition to democracy. All potential opponents, particularly in parliament itself, were cowed into affirming “respect for the result.” It became a standard vow of allegiance to a movement they knew to be disastrous, and they had little choice but to make it.

“The legality of the UK seizure of a tanker heading for Syria with oil from Iran intrigues me. One refers to EU sanctions against Syria, but Iran is not a member of the EU. And the EU as a principle doesn’t impose its sanctions on others. That’s what the US does.”

• The Story Began With UK’s Seizure Of Iranian-Flagged Ship In Gibraltar (O.)

The morning after a group of 30 Royal Marines helped seize the Iranian-flagged Grace 1 in Gibraltar, tired Foreign Office officials did not look exactly jubilant. There was not exactly a sense of foreboding, but diplomats were aware of the wider bilateral consequences for British-Iranian relations. Now, with the capture of a British-owned oil tanker in the Gulf, some of their worst fears have been realised. The Stena Impero and its crew of more than 20 are now in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards – and the UK has been shown to be unable to protect British shipping going through the waterways of the strait of Hormuz.

The British insist that they only impounded Grace 1 due its suspected destination – a port in Syria – not due to the fact that the ship was carrying Iranian oil. European Union sanctions against the regime of Bashir al Assad regime were there to be enforced and international law upheld, the British argued. There seemed little doubt, given its circuitous route, that the ship was bound for Syria. Yet there were some oddities to the British decision. Few previous shipments of oil to Syria have been impounded. The Spanish claim that the British acted under the instruction of the Americans. The Trump administration is trying to freeze all Iranian oil exports as part of its policy of maximum economic sanctions designed to force the Iranians to reopen talks on the nuclear deal signed in 2015.

But Britain opposes that US policy, arguing that it is counterproductive and only likely to strengthen the hands of hardliners in Tehran. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and co-chair of the European council on foreign relations, pinpointed the ambiguities of the British action in Gibraltar: “The legality of the UK seizure of a tanker heading for Syria with oil from Iran intrigues me. One refers to EU sanctions against Syria, but Iran is not a member of the EU. And the EU as a principle doesn’t impose its sanctions on others. That’s what the US does.”

He didn’t lure Britain, but a handful of intellectually challenged posh kids. And anyway it’s far too easy to blame this on Bolton. They did it themselves, May and Hunt et al.

• Bolton Lured Britain Into A Dangerous Trap To Punish Iran (G.)

John Bolton, White House national security adviser and notorious Iraq-era hawk, is a man on a mission. Given broad latitude over policy by Donald Trump, he is widely held to be driving the US confrontation with Iran. And in his passionate bid to tame Tehran, Bolton cares little who gets hurt – even if collateral damage includes a close ally such as Britain. So when Bolton heard British Royal Marines had seized an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar on America’s Independence Day, his joy was unconfined. “Excellent news: UK has detained the supertanker Grace I laden with Iranian oil bound for Syria in violation of EU sanctions,” he exulted on Twitter. Bolton’s delighted reaction suggested the seizure was a surprise.

But accumulating evidence suggests the opposite is true, and that Bolton’s national security team was directly involved in manufacturing the Gibraltar incident. The suspicion is that Conservative politicians, distracted by picking a new prime minister, jockeying for power, and preoccupied with Brexit, stumbled into an American trap. In short, it seems, Britain was set up. The consequences of the Gibraltar affair are only now becoming clear. The seizure of Grace I led directly to Friday’s capture by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of a British tanker, the Stena Impero, in the Strait of Hormuz. Although it has not made an explicit link, Iran had previously vowed to retaliate for Britain’s Gibraltar “piracy”. Now it has its revenge.

I’m pretty sure that’s not true, but it doesn’t matter. Moreover, Spain says Gibraltar is not British either.

• British Letter to UN Says Iran Approached Tanker In Omani Waters (R.)

Britain told the United Nations Security Council on Saturday that a British-flagged tanker seized by Iran was approached by Iranian forces when it was in Omani territorial waters and the action “constitutes illegal interference.” “The ship was exercising the lawful right of transit passage in an international strait as provided for under international law,” Britain’s U.N. mission wrote to the Security Council. “International law requires that the right of transit passage shall not be impeded, and therefore the Iranian action constitutes illegal interference.” The letter, seen by Reuters, was also sent to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Friday’s action in the global oil trade’s most important waterway has been viewed in the West as a major escalation after three months of confrontation that has already taken Iran and the United States to the brink of war. It follows threats from Tehran to retaliate for Britain’s seizure on July 4 of the Iranian tanker Grace 1, accused of violating sanctions on Syria. “Current tensions are extremely concerning, and our priority is to de-escalate. We do not seek confrontation with Iran,” the letter read. “But it is unacceptable and highly escalatory to threaten shipping going about its legitimate business through internationally recognized transit corridors.” Britain called on Iran to release the Stena Impero tanker and told the Security Council it was working to resolve the issue through diplomatic means.

Ha ha. You mean there are sanctions that haven’t been applied yet?

• Britain Mulls Sanctions In Response To Iran Tanker Seizure (R.)

British ministers are making plans aimed at targeting Iran with sanctions in the aftermath of the Iranian seizure of a British-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce on Sunday diplomatic and economic measures, including potential asset freezes, as a response to the incident, according to the report. Britain could push for United Nations and European Union sanctions to be reimposed on Iran after they had been lifted in 2016 following a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, the Telegraph reported.

This is about weaponry, but I’d suggest the UK is mentally too weak.

• UK Too Weak To Address Strategic Threats, Warns MP Committee (O.)

The government has repeatedly failed to invest in defence and security, leaving the UK struggling to cope with emerging threats, an influential parliamentary committee was due to warn on Sunday in a report thrown into sharp relief by the developing crisis in the Persian Gulf. The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy says the next prime minister will have to tackle major challenges – from growing strains on the UK’s relationship with the US and the EU, to the rise of China – if the UK is to meet its defence ambitions.

“If the Government wants to turn the ‘Global Britain’ concept into a meaningful strategy for a positive and self-assured role for the UK after its departure from the EU, then it needs to be more honest about how it proposes to address these challenges,” said the committee chair, Margaret Beckett MP. “It must also back this up with the necessary funding and resources, especially for defence and diplomacy.”

The report’s publication comes after the former chief of defence staff, Lord Richards, warned that the Royal Navy was “just too small to have a significant effect without being with allies”. Speaking in response to the seizure of a British-flagged oil tanker by Iranian authorities, Richards told BBC radio’s Today programme: “The fact is, for whatever reason, our government has invested relatively little against the threat and the risks that we face, particularly more and more in the longer term.” The former first sea lord, Lord West of Spithead, told Sky News that the navy had “too few ships” to escort merchant vessels in dangerous waters.

@Jack has gone into politics. Bad move.

• Twitter Blocks Accounts Of Iranian State Media Outlets (AFP)

A day after Twitter suspended the accounts of several Iranian state media outlets, the social networking service said Saturday it acted after harassment of people linked to the Baha’i faith. Amid soaring tensions in the region, heightened by Iran’s seizure on Friday of a British-flagged tanker, some of the affected media outlets had speculated that the suspensions were related to their coverage of the seizure. But Twitter cited what it said was the coordinated and targeted harassment of people linked to the Baha’i faith, a religious minority that has long faced persecution in Iran. It did not name the suspended accounts, and said it was continuing to investigate the matter.

“Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules,” read English-language messages on each of the Iranian media outlets’ accounts. Mehr news agency, which is close to moderate conservatives in Iran, said its Farsi-language account appeared to have been blocked late Friday following its reports on the seizure of the tanker Stena Impero in the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it seized the Swedish-owned tanker for breaking “international maritime rules” in the strait, a chokepoint for around a third of the world’s sea-borne oil. Mehr’s Farsi-language Twitter page was inaccessible on Saturday, along with those of the official IRNA news agency and the agency of the Young Journalists’ Club.

Wednesday July 24, big day: Boris becomes British PM and Bob Mueller’s circus comes to town.

• Mueller Should Be Arrested For Conspiracy To Overthrow Trump (PCR)

The Mueller report, which had no choice as there was no evidence, but to clear Donald Trump of conspiring with Russian President Putin to steal the last US presidential election from Hillary Clinton, nevertheless managed to keep an aspect of the manufactured hoax known as “Russiagate” alive by indicting some Russian intelligence officers and a Russian Internet clickbait operation for attempting to discredit Hillary with Internet postings. At the time I noticed that Muller’s indictments were based only on his assertion and not on any evidence. As there was no prospect whatsoever of the fake indictments coming to trial, I did not comment on them. I focused instead on Mueller’s statement that Trump might have obstructed justice although he lacked evidence to support the charge.

I noted how corrupt American law has become when it is possible to obstruct justice in the absence of a crime. Democrats and presstitutes were determined to get Trump by any means and remain uninterested in how justice is obstructed when there is no crime. In retrospect, not picking up on Mueller’s indictment-by-hearsay of Russians was a mistake. Not only have the Democrats continued their Russiagate campaign on the basis of the unsubstantiated indictments, but, more importantly, the indictments-by-assertion-alone show Mueller’s total lack of moral character. A prosecutor, indeed a former Director of the FBI, who confuses his unsubstantiated allegation with evidence, is not only a person devoid of any respect for law, but also an extremely dangerous person to have been vetted for the high government positions that he has held.

Or is that the Liberals?

• Are Libertarians the New Neocons? (Daniel McAdams)

There is a disturbing trend in some libertarian circles and among some libertarian organizations to be increasingly enamored with foreign interventionism and US government backed regime change overseas. For those focused on foreign affairs, this is particularly troubling as it is abandoning a key tenet of libertarianism: non-interventionism. Not “your government 6,000 miles away must be changed… but I don’t support the US military doing it.” That is not non-interventionism. Non-interventionism is accepting that others may wish to live in a way you may not approve of. Non-interventionism in your neighbor’s affairs – whether he enjoys reading the Bible or lighting up a marijuana cigarette (or maybe both) – is really the sine qua non of the libertarian mindset: “aint nobody’s business if you do.”

You do not aggress against your neighbor just because you disagree with his life choices that do not infringe on your person or property and you extrapolate that dynamic to where you demand that to the highest extent possible your local, state, and federal governments treat you as you would treat your neighbor. The idea that this critical impulse somehow becomes null and void when it comes to international affairs is truly bizarre. In fact many self-described libertarians full-throatedly cheer when people are in the streets thousands of miles away trying to overthrow their governments. Somehow from this far distant vantage point they are just convinced that the mythical “free state” is about to break out somewhere.

And when someone points out that the semi-hidden hand behind these uprisings is the US government, which seeks to create overseas governments of subservient elites to prop up the (anti-libertarian) US empire, they accuse that person of being an extremist or a conspiracy theorist…or they get really lazy and stupid and just claim you are a “supporter” of the dictator of the day. So, many US libertarians (who knew next to nothing about Venezuela) demanded our support for that great “libertarian” liberator of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, who turned out to be just another crook with zero support from Venezuelans (but a lot of support from the CIA!).

Dmitry, from a Russian perspective, shining his light on what I’ve repeatedly said: the US makes weapons for profit, Russia makes them to defend itself (from US weapons).

• War Profiteers and the Demise of the US Military-Industrial Complex (Orlov)

Within the vast bureaucratic sprawl of the Pentagon there is a group in charge of monitoring the general state of the military-industrial complex and its continued ability to fulfill the requirements of the national defense strategy. Office for acquisition and sustainment and office for industrial policy spends some $100,000 a year producing an Annual Report to Congress. It is available to the general public. It is even available to the general public in Russia, and Russian experts had a really good time poring over it. In fact, it filled them with optimism. You see, Russia wants peace but the US seems to want war and keeps making threatening gestures against a longish list of countries that refuse to do its bidding or simply don’t share its “universal values.”

But now it turns out that threats (and the increasingly toothless economic sanctions) are pretty much all that the US is still capable of dishing out—this in spite of absolutely astronomical levels of defense spending. Let’s see what the US military-industrial complex looks like through a Russian lens. It is important to note that the report’s authors were not aiming to force legislators to finance some specific project. This makes it more valuable than numerous other sources, whose authors’ main objective was to belly up to the federal feeding trough, and which therefore tend to be light on facts and heavy on hype. No doubt, politics still played a part in how various details are portrayed, but there seems to be a limit to the number of problems its authors can airbrush out of the picture and still do a reasonable job in analyzing the situation and in formulating their recommendations.

What knocked Russian analysis over with a feather is the fact that these INDPOL experts (who, like the rest of the US DOD, love acronyms) evaluate the US military-industrial complex from a… market-based perspective! You see, the Russian military-industrial complex is fully owned by the Russian government and works exclusively in its interests; anything else would be considered treason. But the US military-industrial complex is evaluated based on its… profitability! According to INDPOL, it must not only produce products for the military but also acquire market share in the global weapons trade and, perhaps most importantly, maximize profitability for private investors. By this standard, it is doing well: for 2017 the gross margin (EBITDA) for US defense contractors ranged from 15 to 17%, and some subcontractors—Transdigm, for example—managed to deliver no less than 42-45%. “Ah!” cry the Russian experts, “We’ve found the problem! The Americans have legalized war profiteering!”

“I doubt the former Special Counsel will ever sit in that hot-seat.”

• Final Voyage (Kunstler)

[..] the party’s pathetic attempt to revive the walking dead narrative of RussiaGate is not working too well down on Jerold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee. The chairman apparently discovered that his star witness, Robert Mueller, might have to answer some embarrassing questions about the conduct of his investigation — like, why did it go on for two years when his chief deputy, Mr. Weissmann, was informed from the get-go that the main predicate document was a fraud? So, Mr. Mueller’s turn in the witness chair keeps getting postponed clear into the August recess. I doubt the former Special Counsel will ever sit in that hot-seat. If I was him, I sure wouldn’t do it voluntarily. Oh, did anyone notice the House staged an impeachment vote on Wednesday? It flopped too.

Finally, there is the walking time-bomb known as Jeffrey Epstein, Democratic Party poohbah and impresario of an underage sex racket featuring the “Lolita Express” airplane service to his private “Orgy Island” in the Caribbean, with auxiliary party shacks in New York City and the New Mexico Desert. Rogue reports have been styling Epstein’s doings as an international blackmailing operation associated with the CIA and other Intel outfits, including the UK’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, for the purpose of keeping international bigshots on a short leash. Who knows? At the center of it all is former President Bill Clinton, listed twenty-six times on the Lolita Express’s flight manifest — though the ex-Prez said last week in a statement that it was only four times. (Consider the source.) A raft of unsealed documents in the matter has been court-ordered to drop any day, and power-players all over the world — especially in our nation’s capital and on Wall Street — are rumored to be chewing their fingernails down to the nubbins as they wait for it.

The Winds are Shifting

Jul 042019

July 4, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:14 pm Primers Tagged with: Assad, Bolton, China, EU, Gibraltar, Independence Day, Iran, oil tanker, Pompeo, proxy, Russia, sanctions, Suez, tanks, Trump, UK, wind 4 Responses »

Odilon Redon The Birth of Venus II c.1910

How do you define terror? Perhaps, because of the way the term has evolved in the English language, one wouldn’t call the west ‘terrorists’ per se, but ‘we’ are certainly spreading terror and terrorizing very large groups of people. Yeah, bring on the tanks and parade them around town. Add a marching band that plays some war tunes.

The ‘official’ storyline : at the request of the US, Gibraltar police and UK marines have seized an oil tanker in Gibraltar. The super-tanker, 1000 feet (330 meters) long, carrying 2 million barrels, had stopped there after sailing all around the Cape of Good Hope instead of taking the Suez canal on its way, ostensibly, from Iran to Syria.

And, according to the storyline as presented to and in the western press, because the EU still has sanctions on Iran, the British seized the ship. Another little detail I really appreciate is that Spain’s acting foreign minister, Josep Borrell, said Madrid was looking into the seizure and how it may affect Spanish sovereignty since Spain does not recognize the waters around Gibraltar as British.

That Borrell guy is the newly picked EU foreign policy czar, and according to some sources he’s supportive of Iran and critical of Israel. Them’s the webs we weave. He’s certainly in favor of Palestinian statehood. But we’re wandering…

Why did the tanker take that giant detour along the African coastline? Because potential problems were anticipated in the Suez canal. But also: why dock in Gibraltar? Because no problems were anticipated there. However, the US had been following the ship all along, and set this up.

A trap, a set-up, give it a name. I would think this is about Iran, not about sanctions on Syria; that’s just a convenient excuse. Moreover, as people have been pointing out, there have been countless arms deliveries to Syrian rebels in the past years (yes, that’s illegal) which were not seized.

The sanctions on Syria were always aimed at one goal: getting rid of Assad. That purpose failed either miserably or spectacularly, depending on your point of view. It did achieve one thing though, and if I were you I wouldn’t be too sure this was not the goal all along.

That is, out of a pre-war population of 22 million, the United Nations in 2016 identified 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance; over 6 million are internally displaced within Syria, and around 5 million are refugees outside of Syria. About half a million are estimated to have died, the same number as in Iraq.

And Assad is still there and probably stronger than ever. But it doesn’t even matter whether the US/UK/EU regime change efforts are successful or not, and I have no doubt they’ve always known this. Their aim is to create chaos as a war tactic, and kill as many people as they can. How do you define terror, terrorism? However you define it, ‘we’ are spreading it.

That grossly failed attempt to depose Assad has left Europe with a refugee problem it may never be able to control. And the only reason there is such a problem is that Europe, in particular Britain and France, along with the US, tried to bomb these people’s homelands out of existence. Because their leaders didn’t want to conform to “our standards”, i.e. have our oil companies seize and control their supplies.

But while you weren’t looking some things changed, irreversibly so. The US and Europe are no longer the undisputed and overwhelming global military power they once were. Russia has become a target they cannot even consider attacking anymore, because their armies, assembled in NATO, wouldn’t stand a chance.

China is not yet at the ‘might’ level of Russia, but US and NATO are in no position to attack a country of 1.4 billion people either. Their military prominence ended around the turn of the century/millennium, and they’re not going to get it back. Better make peace fast.

So what we’ve seen for a few decades now is proxy wars. In which Russia in particular has been reluctant to engage but decisive when it does. Moscow didn’t want to let Assad go, and so they made sure he stayed. Syria is Russia’s one single stronghold in the Middle East, and deemed indispensable.

Meanwhile, as over half of Syrians, some 11 million people, have been forced to flee their homes, with millions of them traumatized by war, ‘we’ elect to seize a tanker allegedly headed for a refinery in the country, so we can make sure all those people have no oil or less oil for a while longer.

So the refugees that do have the courage and will to return will find it that much harder to rebuild their homes and towns, and will tell those still abroad not to join them. At the same time Assad is doing fine, he may be the target of the sanctions but he doesn’t suffer from them, his people do.

Yes, let’s parade some tanks around town. And let’s praise the heroic UK marines who seized an utterly defenseless oil tanker manned by a bunch of dirt-poor Philippinos. Yay! There is probably some profound irony that explains why Trump and Bolton and Pompeo want a military parade at the very moment the US military must concede defeat in all theaters but the propaganda one.

Still there it is. The only people the US, the west, can still credibly threaten, are defenseless civilians, women, children. The leaders of nations are out of reach. Maduro, Assad, let alone Putin or Xi.

Happy 4th of July. Not sure how independent you yourself are, but I can see a few people who did achieve independence from western terror. Just not the poor, the ones that count. But don’t look at the tanks, look at the wind instead. The winds are shifting.

Debt Rattle November 24 2018

Nov 242018

November 24, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:33 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Brexit, crypto, Ecuador, FANGMAN, Gibraltar, Labour, Macron, McDonnell, Mnuchin, oil, Trump 12 Responses »

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Sun Rising over Water 1825-30

• Britain’s Opposition Labour Party Plots Overthrow Of Capitalism (R.)

• This Sell-Off is Just One Step in Methodical Unwind of Stock Prices (WS)

• Oil Plunges More Than 6% Despite Potential OPEC Cut (R.)

• Bitcoin Loses 25% Of Its Remaining Value During Thanksgiving Week (CNBC)

• Trump Dismisses Report He Is Unhappy With Treasury’s Mnuchin (R.)

• Holiday Doings and Undoings (Kunstler)

• Rising Fuel Price Protests Should Serve As A Red Alert For Macron (I.ie)

• Gibraltar Rocks Final Stages Of Brexit Negotiation (AFP)

• Ecuador Ousts Its London Ambassador, ‘Last Diplomat Assange Knew’ (RT)

• Prosecution of Julian Assange, America’s Betrayal of Its Own Ideals (CD)

• Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case (Taibbi)

• Anonymous Blows Lid Off Huge Psyop In Europe Funded By UK & US (RT)

You really think you can win an election saying this?

• Britain’s Opposition Labour Party Plots Overthrow Of Capitalism (R.)

The British Labour Party’s would-be finance minister, John McDonnell, has a message for the world: he is deadly serious about overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society. McDonnell, 67, who describes Karl Marx as one of his main influences, has been at the vanguard of a left-wing revival in Britain’s main opposition party under fellow socialist Jeremy Corbyn. He has promised sweeping nationalization, higher public spending and an overhaul of the banking system. Asked about his entry in the Who’s Who directory of influential people which lists his passion for “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism”, McDonnell said it was a joke about beer-making, but he agrees with the principle.

“I believe it. I am serious in my intent. I want to transform this economy,” McDonnell told Reuters in an interview. “That means evolving into a system which can achieve that equality, that democracy, that fairness, and tackles the major challenges that we are facing.” With PM Theresa May’s grip on power looking ever more vulnerable as she faces the most perilous crisis of her premiership struggling to win backing for her Brexit deal, Labour are increasingly confident that they will be the next guardians of the world’s fifth-largest economy. McDonnell’s gambit is that the social discontent in Britain which fueled the shock 2016 Brexit vote runs much deeper, and that voters who feel left behind by decades of unchecked capitalism and wounded by years of public spending cuts will rally to his call.

“(It was) like everyone’s grievance went into one vote,” McDonnell said. The polls show that is only part of the picture: voters are tired of economic austerity and unhappy with May’s Brexit negotiations, but Labour are only marginally ahead of the ruling Conservative Party. Some commentators have suggested they should be polling better against a government in disarray. Nevertheless, the combination of an unsated appetite for change and a Brexit-inspired political crisis which has trashed the centrist orthodoxy of British politics, has left Labour confident they will soon win power. McDonnell said his ambition is create the most radical government in modern British history even as the country is grappling with its exit from the EU, the most complex negotiations in Europe since the end of World War Two.

[..] McDonnell has outlined a program of nationalizing the railways, energy and water companies and the postal service, raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy. This would be combined with increased spending on education, skills training, and health care, and harnessing the financial sector to help fund a huge infrastructure investment. At his party’s annual conference two months ago, McDonnell did little to conceal the scale of his ambition. Businesses were stunned by his plan to force all large companies to hand over a tenth of their equity to their workforce.

Possible.

• This Sell-Off is Just One Step in Methodical Unwind of Stock Prices (WS)

It was an ugly Monday and Tuesday followed by a Wednesday that at first look like a real bounce but ended with the indices giving up their gains. This was followed, mercifully, by Thursday when markets were closed, which was followed unmercifully by Friday, during which the whole schmear came unglued again. The S&P 500 index dropped 0.7% on Friday to 2,632 and 3.8% for Thanksgiving week, though this week is usually – by calendar black-magic – a good week, according to the Wall Street Journal: During Thanksgiving weeks going back a decade, the S&P 500 rose on average 1.3%. This leaves the S&P 500 index 1.5% in the hole year-to-date. It’s now back where it had first been on November 30, 2017:

Clearly, when seen over the longer term, the sell-off for now still belongs to the small-fry among sell-offs, with S&P 500 down just 10.5% from its peak:

The Dow dropped 0.7% on Friday and 4.4% during Thanksgiving week, to 24,286. It’s 1.75% in the hole for the year. Technically speaking, it’s not even in a correction, being down only 9.9% from its peak. And the Nasdaq, dropped 0.5% on Friday and 4.3% during Thanksgiving week. According to the Wall Street Journal, during Thanksgiving week over the past 20 years, the Nasdaq rose on average 1.3%. So this is no good for calendar-black-magic aficionados. Where’s the free-wheeling holiday spirit? The Nasdaq is now down 14.7% from its peak at the end of August but remains up 0.5% year-to-date. The Russell 2000 small-caps index edged down today and is down 14.5% from its peak on August 31. It’s 3% in the hole year-to-date and right back where it had first been on September 27, 2017:

The seven FANGMAN stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google’s parent Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, and NVIDIA – fell 1.3% on Friday in combined market cap. Over Thanksgiving week, they have now plunged 6.7%, or by $259 billion. Those are real dollars gone in four trading days with just seven stocks. Since their combined market-cap peak of $4.63 trillion at the end of August, nearly $1 trillion — $994 billion to be precise – has dissolved into ambient air, as their combined market cap has plunged 21.5% in ca. 12 weeks. But if you look at them as individual stocks, it’s even worse. The saving grace for the group as a whole was Microsoft, the second largest stock by market cap, which is threatening to become the largest stock shortly if Apple continues to fall at this pace. Three of the seven have already plunged by 38% to nearly 50%. Two more have plunged by 26% to 27%.

What is it, 34% since the high this year?

• Oil Plunges More Than 6% Despite Potential OPEC Cut (R.)

Oil prices slumped more than 6 percent on Friday, with Brent set for a 12-percent plunge this week, as fears that supply would overpower demand intensified, even as major producers considered cutting output. Oil supply, led by U.S. producers, is growing faster than demand and to prevent a build-up of unused fuel such as the one that emerged in 2015, OPEC is expected to start trimming output after a meeting on Dec. 6. But this has done little so far to prop up prices, which have dropped more than 20 percent so far in November, in a seven-week streak of losses. Deep trade disputes between the world’s two biggest economies and oil consumers, the United States and China, have weighed upon the market.

“The market is pricing in an economic slowdown – they are anticipating that the Chinese trade talks are not going to go well,” said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. “The market doesn’t believe that OPEC is going to be able to act swiftly enough to offset the coming slowdown in demand.” [..] Market fears over weak demand intensified after China reported its lowest gasoline exports in more than a year amid a glut of the fuel in Asia and globally. Stockpiles of gasoline have surged across Asia, with inventories in Singapore, the regional refining hub, rising to a three-month high while Japanese stockpiles also climbed last week. Inventories in the United States are about 7 percent higher than a year ago.

Starting to feel serious.

• Bitcoin Loses 25% Of Its Remaining Value During Thanksgiving Week (CNBC)

Bitcoin continued its move lower Friday, struggling to find footing after a week of pain for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. The digital asset hit a low of $4,119 Friday, according to data from CoinDesk, bringing its seven-day losses to more than 25 percent. In dollar terms, bitcoin’s value dropped by about $1,400 over that time frame. Other cryptocurrencies didn’t hold up this week either. Not a single one in the top 28 by market capitalization was trading in the green Friday, according to CoinMarketCap.com. XRP, the second-largest by market capitalization, fell 6 percent Friday, bringing its one-week losses to 10 percent. Ether was down 7 percent in 24 hours and lost roughly 30 percent for the week.

The total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies fell to $138.6 billion Friday, according to CoinMarketCap data, its lowest level since September 2017. Since its peak, the market has lost about $700 billion in value, according to the data. The tumble for bitcoin started abruptly last week when it fell below $6,000 and hit a new low for the year. The plunge followed what had been a surprisingly calm few months for bitcoin and a break from the rest of its volatile trading year. Since then, prices have hit new 13-month lows and struggled to move out of the $4,300 range. The price dips are a stark contrast from last Thanksgiving when the cryptocurrency was entering a hot streak thanks to a wave of new retail investors. Since that holiday week last year, prices are down by more than 55 percent.

“They never like to ask me for a quote b/c it would kill their story..”

• Trump Dismisses Report He Is Unhappy With Treasury’s Mnuchin (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter on Friday that he was quite happy with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s performance, after The Wall Street Journal reported that the president was dissatisfied with Mnuchin. “I am extremely happy and proud of the job being done by @USTreasury Secretary @stevenmnuchin1,” Trump said in a tweet. The Journal reported that Trump blames Mnuchin for the appointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who has been steadily raising U.S. interest rates. Trump is concerned that higher rates could undercut economic gains ahead of his 2020 reelection bid, the newspaper reported.

Quoting unnamed sources, the Journal said Trump has also expressed displeasure with Mnuchin over stock market turbulence and the Treasury secretary’s skepticism about the White House trade actions against China. “The FAKE NEWS likes to write stories to the contrary, quoting phony sources or jealous people, but they aren’t true. They never like to ask me for a quote b/c it would kill their story,” Trump said on Twitter. Trump has repeatedly criticized the Fed’s rate increases under Powell. In October, he called the Fed “crazy,” “ridiculous” and “my biggest threat.”

A year ago when Trump picked Powell to head the Federal Reserve, Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, was a strong advocate of his nomination. The Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, said Trump, in a conversation with someone who praised Mnuchin’s performance, mentioned stock market volatility and said: “If he’s so good, why is this happening?”

“..Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval.”

• Holiday Doings and Undoings (Kunstler)

Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a nation that can’t navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe spaces, and happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking it is not good enough. The main message from the financials is that the global debt barge has run aground, and with it, the global economy. That mighty engine has been chugging along on promises-to-pay and now the faith that sustained those promises is dissolving.

China, Euroland, and the USA can’t possibly meet their tangled obligations, and are running out of tricks for rigging, gaming, and jacking the bond markets, where all those promises are vested. It boils down to a whole lot of people not getting paid, one way or the other — and it’s really bad for business. Our President has taken full credit for the bubblicious markets, of course, and will be Hooverized as they gurgle around the drain. Given his chimerical personality, he may try to put on an FDR mask — perhaps even sit in a wheelchair — and try a few grand-scale policy tricks to escape the vortex. But the net effect will surely be to make matters worse — for instance, if he can hector the Federal Reserve to buy every bond that isn’t nailed to some deadly derivative booby-trap.

But then he’ll only succeed in crashing the dollar. Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of worthless money.

Urban vs rural. Just like in America.

• Rising Fuel Price Protests Should Serve As A Red Alert For Macron (I.ie)

Within the space of a week, the gilets jaunes have managed to tap into wider discontent with Macron’s presidency and policies, gaining opposition support and momentum as a result. These are not the usual protests or strikes co-ordinated by political parties or unions in France. With no official organisation, no identified leader and no political affiliation, the gilets jaunes phenomenon has been almost completely co-ordinated on social media where it declares “[This] comes about only from the French people”. [..] one thing is certain: their actions have chimed with the public. This despite chaos across France last weekend with roads blocked by protesters at some 2,000 locations. Two people were killed – one when a driver panicked and accidentally accelerated their car into the crowd – in the protests and hundreds reported injured.

Nevertheless, a number of polls have shown that almost three-quarters of French voters approve of the demonstrations, one survey found that more than half of those who voted for Macron support them. The planned tax increases – the price of diesel is due to go up another 6.5 cents per litre and petrol by 2.9 cents – are to come into force in January. They follow a 23pc rise in the cost of diesel and 15pc in petrol in the past year. Internationally, Macron has made much of his commitment to battling climate change and these hikes are part of his domestic policies on that front. His ministers have also argued that the higher price of crude globally also necessitates a rise but protesters complain that fuel taxes have been increasing steadily over the past four years.

One survey this week found that 82pc believe Macron should drop the plans. It also showed that particular demographics – the self-employed and business leaders, plus pensioners and low-income households – were most supportive of the gilets jaunes. The episode also highlights the rift between France’s urban elite and those in its poor rural peripheries. Workers who rely on their cars to get to their jobs in the countryside are particularly aggrieved by the planned tax increases.

One more topic they try to push into the limitless future.

• Gibraltar Rocks Final Stages Of Brexit Negotiation (AFP)

Preparations for a summit to endorse Britain’s deal to quit the European Union risked running aground on the rock of Gibraltar Friday, as Spain defended its veto over the fate of the tiny territory. Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May and leaders of the other 27 EU member states are to meet Sunday to approve their divorce agreement and set a course for negotiating their future post-Brexit relationship. But Spanish officials emerged from talks Friday warning that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez might not attend unless it is guaranteed that no future accord on EU relations involving Gibraltar will be signed without Madrid’s specific assent.

Visiting Cuba, Sanchez said that if the Gibraltar row is not resolved, he might not go to Brussels on Sunday, warning: “If there’s no agreement, it’s very clear hat will happen, there very probably won’t be a European Council.” In Brussels, Luis Marco Aguiriano Nalda, Spain’s secretary of state for European affairs, said Madrid wanted London to put in writing that it shared Madrid’s interpretation of the negotiated Brexit deal regarding Gibraltar. “We have demanded that it be published by the British authorities before the European Council on Sunday,” he said. In London, however, a Downing Street source said he did not know what document Aguiriano could be referring to and added: “We have negotiated on behalf of the whole of the UK family. That includes Gibraltar and the overseas territories.”

The torture never stops.

• Ecuador Ousts Its London Ambassador, ‘Last Diplomat Assange Knew’ (RT)

Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno has terminated the credentials of his UK ambassador, who has been at the center of negotiating the fate of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, as concerns mount over the whistleblower’s safety. The decree, with which Moreno effectively sacked Ecuador’s London ambassador Abad Ortiz, was published by WikiLeaks on Wednesday. The document does not offer any explanation as to why Ortiz, who had been his country’s ambassador to the UK since 2015, is now being permanently recalled. Nor does it name a successor for the outgoing diplomat. The decree is effective immediately.

WikiLeaks tweeted that Abad, appointed to the office under President Rafael Correa, was the last diplomat the long-term self-exiled editor knew in the embassy. “All diplomats known to Assange have now been transferred away from the embassy,” the whistleblowing site claimed. This new and sudden twist in the Assange saga has been met with concern by his supporters, with some suggesting that Moreno is doing Washington’s bidding by removing people who might have stood by Assange and opposed his potential handover to the British police – which is expected to bring about a swift extradition to the US. The dismissal has been called “a silent pro-US coup.”

Best piece on Assange in a while, from Nozomi Hayase.

• Prosecution of Julian Assange, America’s Betrayal of Its Own Ideals (CD)

Just as the Founding Fathers of the United States, by revolting against the autocratic rule of King George were regarded as traitors, by aiding ordinary people expose and defy unjust secret law, WikiLeaks too has been branded as an enemy of the state. Trump’s Secretary of State and the former CIA director, Mike Pompeo calls WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence agency, claiming that the organization threatens American values and needs to be shut down. Members of the US Congress urged the Ecuadorian President to persecute Assange, calling him a “dangerous criminal” and a “threat to global security”. While all these vicious verbal attacks are thrown at him, Assange remains in confinement, over the past months, being completely shut out from the outside, being continually deprived of fresh air, access to medical care and sunlight by the UK government in violation of UN rulings.

All wars start and are fueled by lies and propaganda. Once it was the Vietnam War, where under the command of the US President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin lies unleashed military forces into Southeast Asia. Then came the invasion of Iraq with the former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech at the UN, falsely claiming Iraq had ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. This battle against free speech is another secret war of this empire. It now has become a fog of war, where with the hype of Russia Gate that was created out of thin air, the public was prevented from seeing who the real enemies are.

Taibbi’s piece is okay, and he says some good things, but he doesn’t appear to like Assange, and fails to hide that.

Valid point he makes: The -secret- charges vs Assange have nothing to do with Trump, they pre-date his presidency by years.

• Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case (Taibbi)

It always seemed that Assange viewed his primary role as being a pain in the ass to this increasingly illegitimate system of secrets, a pure iconoclast who took satisfaction in sticking it to the very powerful. I didn’t always agree with its decisions, but Wikileaks was an understandable human response to an increasingly arbitrary, intractable, bureaucratic political system. That it even had to exist spoke to a fundamental flaw in modern Western democracies — i.e. that our world is now so complex and choked with secrets that even releasing hundreds of thousands of documents at a time, we can never be truly informed about the nature of our own societies. Moreover, as the Snowden episode showed, it isn’t clear that knowing unpleasant secrets is the same as being able to change them.

In any case, the institutions Wikileaks perhaps naively took on once upon a time are getting ready to hit back. Frankly it’s surprising it’s taken this long. I’m surprised Assange is still alive, to be honest. If Assange ends up on trial, he’ll be villainized by most of the press, which stopped seeing the “lulz” in his behavior for good once Donald Trump was elected. The perception that Assange worked with Vladimir Putin to achieve his ends has further hardened responses among his former media allies. As to the latter, Assange denies cooperating with the Russians, insisting his source for the DNC leak was not a “state actor.” It doesn’t matter. That PR battle has already been decided.

Courts have held reporters cannot be held liable for illegal behavior of sources. [..] It’s always been the source’s responsibility to deal with that civil or criminal risk. The press traditionally had to decide whether or not leaked material was newsworthy, and make sure it was true. The government has been searching for a way to change that equation. The Holy Grail would be a precedent that forces reporters to share risk of jail with sources. Separate from Assange, prosecutions of leakers have sharply escalated in the last decade. The government has steadily tiptoed toward describing publishers as criminal conspirators.

It’s impossible to know exactly what recent news about an indictment means until we see it (the Reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press has already filed a motion to unseal the charges). If there is a case, it could be anything in the federal criminal code, perhaps even unrelated to leaks. Who knows? But the more likely eventuality is a prosecution that uses the unpopularity of Assange to shut one of the last loopholes in our expanding secrecy bureaucracy. Americans seem not to grasp what might be at stake. Wikileaks briefly opened a window into the uglier side of our society, and if publication of such leaks is criminalized, it probably won’t open again.

Europe needs an enemy. Or rather, NATO does.

• Anonymous Blows Lid Off Huge Psyop In Europe Funded By UK & US (RT)

Anonymous has published documents which it claims have unearthed a massive UK-led psyop to create a “large-scale information secret service” in Europe – all under the guise of countering “Russian propaganda.” In a document dump on November 5, the group exposed the UK-based ‘Integrity Initiative’, said to have been established by the ominously titled Institute for Statecraft in 2015. The main objective is “to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare.” The Institute for Statecraft is affiliated with the NATO HQ Public Diplomacy Division and the Home Office-funded ‘Prevent’ program, so objectivity is, of course, at the forefront of their work.

Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of “clusters” of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing “evidence” of Russian interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin, with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to “change attitudes in Russia itself” as well as influencing Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked documents states.

At present, the vast network allegedly has clusters for Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Norway, Serbia, and Montenegro… but there’s more! According to the Anonymous leak, major plans to expand the sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, the US, and Canada, as well as the MENA region, are allegedly underway. The clusters’ work is apparently done under absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies, the leak claims, some of which are listed as part of the documentation.

Debt Rattle December 20 2017

Dec 202017

December 20, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: bitcoin, Brexit, China, Coinbase, Facebook, Gibraltar, Greece, homeless, Lesbos, overspending, refugees 10 Responses »

Claude Monet Houses of Parliament, Sunset 1904

• Bitcoin Plunges Over $2,500, Bounces Back Somewhat, Bitcoin Cash Surges (MW)

• Coinbase Enables -Then Disables- Bitcoin Cash Trading: Insider Trading? (BI)

• From Bitcoin To Hashgraph: The Crypto Revolution (Mike Maloney)

• Is It 1999? 2007? Or Both? (Roberts)

• China Is Having Second Thoughts About Cracking Down On Ballooning Debt (CNBC)

• EU Commission May Launch Moves To Punish Poland Over Legal Reforms (R.)

• Facebook’s New Nemesis Is a Besuited German Antitrust Watchdog (BBG)

• Un-Merry Christmas: Perverse Incentives to Over-Consume and Over-Spend (CHS)

• Too Late, Theresa – Brexit Offer To EU Citizens Leaves Many Cold (R.)

• Centuries-Old Gibraltar Dispute Threatens Brexit Progress (BBG)

• UK Government Condemned Over ‘Abject Failure’ To Tackle Homelessness (Ind.)

• Salaries Continue To Decline In Greece

• Footage Emerges From Lesbos Refugee Camp Showing Shocking Conditions (K.)

• 10 People Injured In Clashes At Moria Refugee Camp On Lesbos (K.)

• Our Selective Blindness Is Lethal To The Living World (G.)

Pretty wild. You sure you want your savings go through that?

• Bitcoin Plunges Over $2,500, Bounces Back Somewhat, Bitcoin Cash Surges (MW)

The price of bitcoin plunged about 14% — more than $2,500 — Tuesday night after cryptocurrency trading site Coinbase said it would allow its customers to buy and sell its rival offshoot currency, bitcoin cash. In a matter of hours, the price of bitcoin dropped from $18,125 to as low as $15,578. Bitcoin later rallied somewhat and was trading within a $1,000-range; it was last at $16,875 Tuesday night. Bitcoin futures on the CME Group’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange were last trading at $17,425, off more than $700 from the afternoon. Bitcoin cash, meanwhile, rallied more than 50% to all-time highs above $3,300. It was last trading at $3,303, according to CoinMarketCap. “Sends and receives are available immediately,” Coinbase said in a blog post Tuesday announcing bitcoin-cash trading.

“Buys and sells will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will take a few hours.” However, Coinbase and its GDAX exchange late Tuesday suspended bitcoin-cash trading after just four minutes until 9 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday, apparently until traffic settles down and liquidity is established. Bitcoin cash was created by a split from bitcoin on Aug. 1 by a faction of disgruntled developers, and allows virtual miners to process transactions in larger units — 8 megabytes rather than the 1-MB bitcoin blocks. The fledgling cryptocurrency has expanded 10-fold since then, and is now the third-largest by market cap, at $55.6 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

Volatility, liquidity, insider trading.

• Coinbase Enables -Then Disables- Bitcoin Cash Trading: Insider Trading? (BI)

Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms, shocked the crypto-world with its announcement Tuesday evening that it would allow users to buy and sell bitcoin cash. The news sent bitcoin cash, the spin-off cryptocurrency of bitcoin launched in August, to an all-time high above $3,609 per data from Markets Insider. On Coinbase’s GDAX platform, the price of the cryptocurrency reached well above $8,000 per coin. Bitcoin cash’s appreciation began slightly before the announcement on some exchanges, raising concerns about the possibility of insider trading by employees with advanced knowledge of the news. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a post early Wednesday morning that the company was looking into the matter.

“Given the price increase in the hours leading up the announcement, we will be conducting an investigation into this matter”, he said. If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies- directly or indirectly- I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action. The price spike appeared to put pressure on Coinbase. Nearly four hours after the San Francisco-based firm announced it was supporting bitcoin cash trading, it said users wouldn’t be able to buy and sell the cryptocurrency until Wednesday. “An update on Bitcoin Cash for our customers: sends and receives are functional,” the company said in a tweet at 11:15 p.m. ET. “Buys and sells on Coinbase.com and in our mobile apps will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will happen tomorrow.”

Ouch. The company said in a blog post it disabled trading because of “significant volatility.” In addition to bitcoin cash spiking by almost $1,000, cryptocurrency trading volumes reached an all-time high above $49 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Coinbase has struggled to fully function under such demand in the past.

Bitcoin this week

Our friend and gold bug Mike has lofty words.

• From Bitcoin To Hashgraph: The Crypto Revolution (Mike Maloney)

Today, mankind stands at a crossroads, and the path that humanity chooses may have a greater impact on our freedom and prosperity than any event in history. In 2008 a new technology was introduced that is so important that its destiny, and the destiny of mankind are inextricably linked. It is so powerful that if captured and controlled, it could enslave all of humanity. But if allowed to remain free and flourish – it could foster unimaginable levels of peace and prosperity. It has the power to replace all financial systems globally, to supplant 90% of Wall St, and to provide some functions of government. It has no agenda. It’s always fair and impartial. It can not be manipulated, subverted, corrupted or cheated.

And – it inverts the power structure and places control of one’s destiny in the hands of the individual. In the future, when we look back at the 2.6 million-year timeline of human development and the major turning points that led to modern civilization – the creation of farming, the domestication of animals, the invention of the wheel, the harnessing of electricity and the splitting of the atom – the sixty year development of computers, the internet and this new technology will be looked upon as a single event…a turning point that will change the course of human history. It’s called Full Consensus Distibuted Ledger Technology, and so far its major use has been for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin….but its potential goes far, far beyond that.

Of course, as always, Lance has a lot more to say (click the link). I picked out his graph beacuse it is exceptionally strong.

• Is It 1999? 2007? Or Both? (Roberts)

I have combined the three periods below, scaled to 100, so you can see just how far we have currently gone. Sure. This time could be different. It just probably isn’t.

Beijing has been aware of this for a long time. Don’t watch what they say, watch what they do.

• China Is Having Second Thoughts About Cracking Down On Ballooning Debt (CNBC)

China is planning to relax its goal of cutting debt in its economic outline that’s set for release Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The revised plan will instead clamp down on the rise in borrowing, sources told the WSJ. The move would fly in the face of the Chinese government’s mission to bring down the country’s soaring debt, a goal President Xi Jinping has made a cornerstone to his economic platform. The weakened priority may prove to be a concession by top Communist Party leaders that China’s economy may be more reliant on leveraged growth than the government would like. The Journal added that, by cooling its stance on debt, Beijing is hinting that it would rather fuel growth with higher debt than pursue austerity measures.

Chinese debt levels jumped the most in four years in September, according to Reuters. There’s speculation that the size of China’s debt load may be three times its economy. China may be feeling pressure to keep its economy growing as the U.S. is set to pass its biggest tax overhaul in 30 years this week, which will lower the corporate tax rate to theoretically make more companies competitive with China. To be sure, Xi and the Communist Party have been hard at work to curb borrowing between banks, the Journal noted. But since the crackdown on intrabank lending, smaller banks have scaled risky borrowing.

Don’t think Poland will react very well to being ‘punished’.

• EU Commission May Launch Moves To Punish Poland Over Legal Reforms (R.)

In what would be an unprecedented move, the European Commission could invoke Article 7 of the European Union’s founding Lisbon Treaty to punish Warsaw for breaking its rules on human rights and democratic values. “Unless the Polish government postpones these court reforms, we will have no choice but to trigger Article 7,” said a senior EU official before a Commission meeting on Wednesday, where Poland’s reforms are on the agenda. Poland’s new prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in Brussels last week that “the decision has already been made”. The Commission’s deputy head Frans Timmermans warned in July that Poland was “perilously close” to facing sanctions. Such a punishment could still be blocked. Hungary, Poland’s closest ally in the EU, is likely to argue strongly against it.

But the mere threat of it underlines the sharp deterioration in ties between Warsaw and Brussels since the socially conservative Law and Justice (PiS) won power in late 2015. The Commission says Poland’s judicial reforms limit judges’ independence. Polish President Andrzej Duda has until Jan. 5 to sign them into law. If all EU governments agree, Poland could have its voting rights in the EU suspended, and may also see cuts in billions of euros of EU aid. The PiS government rejects accusations of undemocratic behavior and says its reforms are needed because courts are slow, inefficient and steeped in a communist era-mentality.

Cartel Office, no less.

• Facebook’s New Nemesis Is a Besuited German Antitrust Watchdog (BBG)

Andreas Mundt is Facebook’s new nemesis. Mundt, 57, is the president of the Federal Cartel Office, Germany’s competition regulator. For nearly two years, his agency has been probing whether a key part of the Silicon Valley giant’s business model is an abuse of a market dominance. In a case that caused much surprise outside Germany, Mundt unveiled preliminary findings on Tuesday, saying Facebook may take advantage of its popularity to bully users into agreeing to terms and conditions they often don’t understand. The small print allows using the data to generate the targeted ads that make the company so rich. “Competition law would be poorer without somebody like Andreas Mundt,” said Nelson Jung, a lawyer at Clifford Chance in London. “He’s characterized by his willingness to push boundaries and challenge the status quo.”

Facebook took a dim view, saying the report painted an “inaccurate picture” of how it operates, homing in on the criticism that it’s dominant, an important legal term that might curb future behavior. [..] Facebook didn’t hold back in its attempt to rebut Mundt’s report, saying that it’s wrong to label it as “dominant” in Germany. “A dominant company can save the expense of innovating because it doesn’t have to fear someone else developing better features. We must constantly innovate to attract people. If we fail, people will go elsewhere.” According to Mundt, when data is called the new currency of the digital age, then the relationship to competition law is obvious. That’s also why he’s rejecting criticism that the probe blurs the line between privacy and antitrust enforcement.

“It can only be an antitrust issue if a customer can’t avoid the company because it’s dominating the market. Of course that has a privacy angle but it certainly also has an antitrust angle.” Mundt calls the Facebook investigation a “pioneer case” since “for the first time we’re looking into the relation between market power and big data.” For him, it’s as important as the European Union’s clampdown on Alphabet’s Google, which in July was fined 2.4 billion-euros for skewing shopping search results. “I like the Google decision, it set out some markers for the future,” Mundt said. “That’s what we’re trying with the Facebook case as well, regardless of what the result will now be.”

Well, Toys ‘R’ Us is already dying. Our economies run on overspending.

• Un-Merry Christmas: Perverse Incentives to Over-Consume and Over-Spend (CHS)

Few topics are off-limits nowadays: the personal and private are now splashed everywhere for all to see. One topic is still taboo: the holiday’s perverse incentives to over-consume and over-spend,lest our economy implode. This topic is taboo because it strikes at the very heart of our socio-economic system, which is fundamentally based on permanent growth, the faster the better, as if unlimited expansion on a finite planet is not just possible, but desirable. In the current Mode of Production, the solution to every social and economic ill is to “grow our way out of it.” The solution to unemployment: jump-start growth by expanding consumption, spending and borrowing. The solution to stagnant wages: jump-start growth. The solution to declining profits: jump-start growth. The solution to government deficit spending: jump-start growth. And so on.

So what happens when most people have not just the basics of life, but a surplus of stuff? Where is the growth going to come from if people already have everything? The answer is three-fold: 1. Replace a perfectly good product with a new product and dump the old one in the landfill. 2. Buy duplicates and put the surplus products in the closet or storage facility. 3. Buy gimmicks (Pet Rocks, etc.) that are tossed in the dump shortly after the holiday gift-giving season ends. But does this Landfill Economy make sense? The cheap oil is about gone, and so does it make any rational sense to burn the last of the cheap fossil fuels on assembling stuff nobody needs in China, shipping it thousands of miles to retailers or Amazon warehouses, adding it to the immense piles of stuff most households already own, and then shipping the old but still functional products to the landfill, just to keep the economy humming?

This is of course insane. Decisions aren’t being made as if scarcity matters; the goals and incentives are set to encourage perverse and destructive overconsumption and overspending: not only are we squandering resources in the sacrifice to the false gods of “growth,” we’re indebting households to do so, stripping income that could have been saved and invested in productive uses. In the lunatic asylum of the current economic model, media anchors sport grins of delirious joy when reporting increases in holiday spending, as if a bump higher from $680 billion to $700 billion is a gargantuan win for the flailing economy.

There are no Britons ready to fill the roles at either the high end -academics- or the low end -fruit pickers-.

• Too Late, Theresa – Brexit Offer To EU Citizens Leaves Many Cold (R.)

Back from Brussels with a hard-fought Brexit deal, Prime Minister Theresa May wrote an open letter to the three million citizens of other European Union states living in Britain. “I know our country would be poorer if you left and I want you to stay,” she wrote after striking the initial agreement, which promises to secure their British residency rights after Brexit and allows the negotiations to move onto trade relations. But for some EU nationals – who have endured uncertainty over their rights since the Brexit vote in June 2016, not to mention an unpleasant feeling that many Britons do not want them around – May’s Dec. 8 deal is too little, too late. It’s too late to keep German nurse Daniela Jones in the chronically short-staffed National Health Service (NHS), where she worked for 35 years.

It’s too late for French psychotherapist Baya Salmon-Hawk, who after 40 years in Britain has moved to Ireland to remain in the EU. It’s too late for French accountant Nathalie Duran, who is planning early retirement in France because after 31 years as a taxpayer in Britain she objects to being told she has to pay a fee and fill in forms to be granted a new “settled status”. “I will have to regretfully decline your generous offer for settled status and oblige your lovely countrymen’s wishes and go home,” she wrote on Facebook in a response to May laden with irony. Duran told Reuters that the prime minister’s “late outpouring of love” for EU citizens, after years of tough talk on the need to cut immigration, could not mask negative attitudes towards immigrants unleashed by the Brexit vote. “I think it’s turning ugly,” said 56-year-old Duran. “It’s now OK to say ‘go home foreigners’.”

It’s whack-a-mole thing. New issues keep popping up.

• Centuries-Old Gibraltar Dispute Threatens Brexit Progress (BBG)

A 300-year-old argument between Britain and Spain over a small piece of land is threatening to derail Theresa May’s plans to help businesses navigate Brexit. U.K. officials fear Spain will threaten to veto a Brexit transition phase if the British prime minister refuses to negotiate a separate deal with the government in Madrid that covers the disputed territory of Gibraltar. While the peninsula has been in British hands since 1713, Spain maintains a claim over the 2.6 square miles (6.7 square kilometers) of land. Fears are growing among ministers in London that a new framework for the next phase of Brexit talks, due to be outlined by the European Union on Wednesday, might reignite the centuries-old arguments, a U.K. official said.

May faces pressure to quickly strike a deal on transitional terms to assure U.K.-based businesses that trade rules won’t change suddenly on Brexit day in March 2019. May wants an agreement on the transition – or “implementation” – phase by March 2018 in order to shift talks on to the long-term future trade agreement. She hopes the two-year period of stability immediately after Brexit will help encourage businesses to stay based in the U.K. Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suggested his government would need to give its explicit consent to any transitional deal affecting Gibraltar. The measure would require separate negotiations between London and Madrid, he said. [..] One U.K. official who asked not to be identified said British overseas territories must be included within the EU’s guidelines for negotiating an overall transitional period. To do anything else would be a contradiction in the EU’s own position, the official said.

So does Labour stand up for them? really? How do they do that?

• UK Government Condemned Over ‘Abject Failure’ To Tackle Homelessness (Ind.)

The Government has been condemned for taking an “unacceptably complacent” attitude towards tackling homelessness, as soaring numbers of people are forced to live on the streets or in temporary accommodation. A damning report by the cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said ministerial attempts to solve the “national crisis” had ended in “abject failure”. Figures show more than 9,000 people are sleeping rough on the streets of England at any one time – up 134% since 2011. Over 79,000 households, including 120,000 children, are meanwhile homeless and living in temporary accommodation – a rise of 65% since 2010.

Recent research by charity Shelter revealed that child homelessness has reached a 10-year high, with nearly 130,000 children in Britain set to wake up homeless and in temporary accommodation this Christmas. But the Government’s commitment to eliminate rough sleeping by 2027 will only address the “tip of the iceberg”, according to the PAC report, which found there to be an “unacceptable shortage” of realistic housing options for the homeless or those at risk of homelessness.

Which cuts consumer spending, which cuts jobs, which cuts consumer spending, rinse and repeat.

• Salaries Continue To Decline In Greece

Salaries have declined considerably and the number of workers on low wages has expanded, explaining the increase in jobs recorded by the Labor Ministry’s hirings database Ergani this year. A direct comparison of the first three weeks of October 2017 with the same period last year changes the rosy image of the local labor market that the government is attempting to present. The figures for this year show that more than six in 10 (64.27%) of the total 1,824,437 workers employed at 247,236 enterprises were on salaries of up to 1,000 euros per month gross. Fewer than two-thirds of them, accounting for 759,326 in absolute figures or 41.62% of all workers, were employed full-time, while the rest (22.65%) appeared to have part-time jobs that earned less than 500 euros a month.

Data also show the number of self-employed increased by 121,913 from October 2016, but this was not accompanied by an increase in salaries. The average salary in October 2017 dropped to 1,024.90 euros from 1,060.30 a year earlier. Across the labor market, full-time workers accounted for 68.44% of the total, virtually unchanged from the 68.28% rate in October 2016. However, the number of enterprises rose by 14,085, or 6.04%, from 233,151 in October last year. Over the 12-month period, flexible employment (part-time and shift work) grew by 30,556 jobs or 7.98%.

A growing trend has been recorded toward jobs paying between 500 and 600 euros per month: One in nine workers (11% or 200,759) fall into this revenue category, up by a remarkable 13.9% from October 2016 – a rise that is far greater than the overall increase in jobs. Eurostat data showed on Tuesday that while the hourly cost of labor in Greece rose 0.8% in the third quarter of 2017, salary costs fell 1.8% and non-salary costs (social security contributions etc) increased 8.6%.

It’ll be a bitter winter.

• Footage Emerges From Lesbos Refugee Camp Showing Shocking Conditions (K.)

US-based internet media company BuzzFeed has published a series of photographs and videos shot by residents inside the government-run Moria refugee and migrant processing center on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos. The scenes of misery and squalor are also evident in a report on Deutsche Welle on Monday, which was International Migrants Day, showing footage taken by hidden camera inside the same facility. BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick said in his report that a 25-year-old man from Iraq named Noor and a 27-year-old man from Syria named Ammar agreed to provide the reporter with videos from inside the fenced-in perimeter of the former army camp, which is run by the Greek military.

The footage, which Broderick also posed on his Twitter account, provides a rare glimpse at conditions inside the camp, which was originally built to accommodate some 2,000 migrants and refugees and is now home to around 6,000 people, including unaccompanied minors, children, pregnant women and disabled or elderly individuals. Images of a shower area show a row of filthy stalls with doors hanging off their hinges, allowing little if any privacy. Many residents collect water in plastic bottles to bathe themselves rather than entering the showers, the witnesses inside the facility are quoted as saying after sending photographs of huge piles of plastic water bottled. The toilets are so unsanitary, they add, that many residents prefer to go to the bathroom in the open air, in a part of an olive tree grove set aside for this purpose.

Streets in the camp flood in the rain and are lined with tents that may accommodate more than one family and have been strengthened to withstand winter conditions with plastic sheets. In another video, two police officers are seen forcibly carrying a man by his arms and leg and shouting abuse at him after breaking up a fight between residents. Several international rights groups have decried conditions at Moria for months, calling on the Greek government to ease overcrowding and improve accommodation and sanitation standards. Squalid and cramped conditions have also led to riots and fights breaking out inside the facility.

“300 to 350 unaccompanied minors and hundreds of children, women and elderly and disabled people.”

• 10 People Injured In Clashes At Moria Refugee Camp On Lesbos (K.)

Around 10 people were rushed to hospital on Lesvos on Tuesday night following violent clashes between rival groups in the Moria refugee and migrant camp. Riot police were called in to quell the unrest, which reportedly broke out between rival groups of Iraqi and Afghan nationals and resulted in several small fires being set. Tension is rife at Moria, where scant resources are being stretched at almost three times the camp’s capacity and conditions are squalid.

Among its 6,000-plus residents there are around 300 to 350 unaccompanied minors and hundreds of children, women and elderly and disabled people. Tuesday night’s clashes came a day after American news outlet BuzzFeed and Germany’s Deutsche Welle published videos of the camp’s interior showing the extent of the filth and squalor to which residents are being subjected. Journalists are not allowed into the military-run camp without the prior agreement of authorities, so the exact extent of Tuesday’s and other similar clashes are not known.

Blind to the species that were already gone when you were born.

• Our Selective Blindness Is Lethal To The Living World (G.)

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others. I might find myself standing, transfixed, by the roadside, watching a sparrowhawk hunting among the bushes, astonished that other people could ignore it. But they might just as well be wondering how I could have failed to notice the new V6 Pentastar Sahara that just drove past. As the psychologist Richard Wiseman points out: “At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings … your brain quickly identifies what it considers to be the most significant aspects of your surroundings, and focuses almost all of its attention on these elements.” Everything else remains unseen.

Our selective blindness is lethal to the living world. Joni Mitchell’s claim that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” is, sadly, untrue: our collective memory is wiped clean by ecological loss. One of the most important concepts defining our relationship to the natural world is shifting baseline syndrome, coined by the fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly. The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion. So we forget that the default state of almost all ecosystems – on land and at sea – is domination by a megafauna.

We are unaware that there is something deeply weird about British waters; they are not thronged with great whales, vast shoals of bluefin tuna, two-metre cod and halibut the size of doors, as they were until a few centuries ago. We are unaware that the absence of elephants, rhinos, lions, scimitar cats, hyenas and hippos, that lived in this country during the last interglacial period (when the climate was almost identical to today’s), is also an artefact of human activity. And the erosion continues. Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars. I can picture a moment at which the birds stop singing, and people wake up and make breakfast and go to work without noticing that anything has changed.

Debt Rattle April 2 2017

Apr 022017

April 2, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: demand, EU, fish farm, Gibraltar, Iceland, May, refugees, Russia, Trump, Turkey 3 Responses »

DPC Gillender Building, corner of Nassau and Wall Streets, built 1897, wrecked 1910 1900

• Why Trump Won’t Cut Taxes (Stockman)

• Collapse In Demand (Fear)

• Iceland’s Jailed Bankers Say They Were Scapegoats For Financial Crisis (AFP)

• Blaming Russia for Everything (Robert Parry)

• EU Offers Spain Veto Right Over Gibraltar After Brexit Talks (R.)

• The European Union Lays Out A Greek Trap For The United Kingdom (Coppola)

• Theresa May May Have Miscalculated (Varoufakis)

• The Demise of the Anatolian Tiger – Turkey on Verge of Bankruptcy (Spiegel)

• The Pentagon Doesn’t Want Turkey’s Help In Syria (WE)

• Salmon Farming In Crisis: ‘A Chemical Arms Race In The Seas’ (G.)

• Italy Praised For Giving Lone Child Refugees Legal Protection (Week)

• Europe Keeps Its Rescue Ships Far From Where Refugees Drown (I’Cept)

Stockman won’t let go.

• Why Trump Won’t Cut Taxes (Stockman)

[..] even the money printers have made it clear in no uncertain terms that they are done for this cycle, anyway, and that they will be belatedly but consistently raising interest rates for what ought to be a truly scary reason. That is, the denizens of the Eccles Building have finally realized that they have not outlawed the business cycle after all and need to raise rates toward 2-3% so that they have headroom to “cut” the next time the economy slides into the ditch. In effect, the Fed is saying to Wall Street: “Price in” a recession because we are! After all, our monetary central planners are not reluctantly allowing interest rates to lift off the zero bound because they have become converts to the cause of honest price discovery – nor are they fixing to liberate money rates, debt yields, and the prices of stocks and other financial assets to clear on the free market.

Instead, they are merely storing up monetary ammo for the next downturn. But the Wall Street mules keep buying the dips anyway because they are under the preposterous delusion that one source of “stimulus” is just as good as the next. And since the gamblers have now decreed that the “stimulus” baton be handed off to fiscal policy, it only remains for Congress and the White House to shape up and get the job done with all deliberate speed. But they won’t. Not in a million years. The massive Trump tax cut and infrastructure stimulus is DOA because Uncle Sam is broke and the U.S. economy has slithered into moribund old age.

In that context, it’s not remotely the same as the 12 members of the FOMC sitting behind closed doors for two days jawing about the short-term economic weather; and then at the conclusion of their gabfest, ordering the New York Fed’s open market desk to flood the canyons of Wall Street with cash by buying another $80 billion of bonds with digital credits conjured from thin air. Au contraire. Fiscal policy is inherently an exercise in herding cats and an especially impossible one when the cupboards are bare. [..] what lies directly ahead, therefore, is another bumbling attempt by the White House and Congressional Republicans to hammer out an FY 2018 budget resolution and what amounts to a 10-year fiscal plan. And it is there where the whole fantasy of the Trump Stimulus comes a cropper. There are not remotely 218 GOP votes for what would be a $12 -13 trillion add to the national debt with the Trump Stimulus program over the next decade – even with all the “dynamic” scoring and revenue “reflows” that are imaginable.

How the sytem works (and then doesn’t): “..workers take on debt that fuels the profits of the corporates that dominate the consumer supply chains. However this rise in corporate profits has not been recycled back into the real economy via workers wages. There will come a point where the workers can no longer take on more debt. When this happens consumer demand will fall, wages will fall and unemployment will rise.”

• Collapse In Demand (Fear)

John Maynard Keynes said that, a fall in bank lending leads to a fall in consumer demand creating recession. He was right, a fall in bank lending does create a fall in consumer demand, it also creates recession and in extreme cases can cause a complete meltdown of the entire economy as in 2008. So the question is, why does bank lending fall? A rise in interest rates can make new borrowing too expensive, it can also lead to existing borrowers defaulting on their loans. This was the catalyst for the 2007 subprime crash in the United States. The graph below shows that US interest rates went from 1% to 5% in the run up to the subprime crash.

Interest rate rises can accelerate a fall in borrowing and a fall in demand, but interest rate rises are not the cause of these falls. Borrowing would eventually, slowly fall over time even if interest rates had remained low. Most of us are now aware that banks create new deposits when they loan, they don’t lend other peoples deposits. How they do it is not important, accepting that they do, is fundamental to understanding the problem. See graph.

The bank creation of money via lending and debt is nothing new, what has changed is the amount of money creation and the ability to recycle this new money back to the debtors. The large increase in debt over the last 30 to 40 years has funded a massive increase in consumerism, consumerism is no longer constrained by wages but rather by how much debt people can accumulate. The graph below shows the result.

Basically we have a trickle up effect, workers take on debt that fuels the profits of the corporates that dominate the consumer supply chains. However this rise in corporate profits has not been recycled back into the real economy via workers wages. There will come a point where the workers can no longer take on more debt. When this happens consumer demand will fall, wages will fall and unemployment will rise. Existing loans made by workers will fall into default, creating another banking crisis. If the banks are not saved by government or central bank intervention the credit created by the banks will become worthless. So, it is in the interests of the wealthy elite to protect the banking system whatever the cost to the rest of society. In the end the wealthy elite will themselves, destroy the financial system by taking so much of it that demand collapses.

Well, it’s true they were the only ones to go to jail…

• Iceland’s Jailed Bankers Say They Were Scapegoats For Financial Crisis (AFP)

Once reviled symbols of rogue capitalism, Iceland’s ex-bankers now say they were scapegoats: jailed for their roles in the 2008 financial crisis, they’re taking their cases to the European Court of Human Rights. In 2008, after Iceland’s inflated financial system imploded, the three main banks Kaupthing, Glitnir, and Landsbanki collapsed. The government urgently nationalised them, then asked the IMF for an emergency bailout, a first for a western European country in 25 years. The crisis brought to light the bankers’ questionable practices, often involving artificially inflating the value of the banks’ assets by providing cheap loans to shareholders to buy even more shares in the bank. Without realising it, thousands of Icelanders had thus placed their life savings in a house of cards.

Since then, dozens of so-called “banksters” have been convicted, about 20 of them to prison, for manipulating the market. Some of them now claim they didn’t get fair trials, and have turned to the European Court of Human Rights. Sentenced by an Icelandic appeals court to four years in prison, Sigurdur Einarsson, the former chairman of the board of Kaupthing, spent one year behind bars before being released. He is critical of what he dubs Iceland’s “scapegoat” justice system, which he claims turned a blind eye to unlawful proceedings during his trial. “Some of the judges were partial … because they had lost a lot of money during the economic crisis,” Einarsson told AFP. “This was not a just and fair trial. (This is) very important because Iceland praises itself for being a Western democratic country, and one of the key issues for that is having fair trials for everyone.”

Good topic for Parry to delve into.

• Blaming Russia for Everything (Robert Parry)

When Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign fails seemingly because he was a wet-behind-the-ears candidate who performed like a robot during debates repeating the same talking points over and over, you might have cited those shortcomings to explain why “Little Marco” flamed out. However, if you did, that would make you a Russian “useful idiot”! The “real” reason for his failure, as we learned from Thursday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, was Russia! When Americans turned against President Obama’s Pacific trade deals, you might have thought that it was because people across the country had grown sick and tired of these neoliberal agreements that have left large swaths of the country deindustrialized and former blue-collar workers turning to opioids and alcohol. But if you did think that, that would mean you are a dupe of the clever Russkies, as ex-British spy Christopher Steele made clear in one of his “oppo” research reports against Donald Trump.

As Steele’s dossier explained, the rejection of Obama’s TPP and TTIP trade deals resulted from Russian propaganda! When Hillary Clinton boots a presidential election that was literally hers to lose, you might have thought that she lost because she insisted on channeling her State Department emails through a private server that endangered national security; that she gave paid speeches to Wall Street and tried to hide the contents from the voters; that she called half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables”; that she was a widely disliked establishment candidate in an anti-establishment year; that she was shoved down the throats of progressive Democrats by a Democratic Party hierarchy that made her nomination “inevitable” via the undemocratic use of unelected “super-delegates”; that some of her State Department emails were found on the laptop of suspected sex offender Anthony Weiner (the husband of Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin); and that the laptop discovery caused FBI Director James Comey to briefly reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private email server in the last days of the campaign.

You might even recall that Clinton herself blamed her late collapse in the polls on Comey’s announcement, as did other liberal luminaries such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But if you thought those thoughts or remembered those memories, that is just more proof that you are a “Russian mole”! As we all should know in our properly restructured memory banks and our rearranged sense of reality, it was all Russia’s fault! Russia did it by undermining our democratic process through the clever means of releasing truthful information via WikiLeaks that provided evidence of how the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process against Sen. Bernie Sanders, revealed the contents of Clinton’s hidden Wall Street speeches, and exposed pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation in its dealings with foreign entities.

Weird games. That’s Brussels for you.

• EU Offers Spain Veto Right Over Gibraltar After Brexit Talks (R.)

The European Union on Friday offered Spain a right of veto over the future relationship between Gibraltar and the EU after Britain leaves the bloc, a move that could smooth Brexit talks but also dash Gibraltar’s hopes of winning a special status. The future of Gibraltar, a rocky British enclave on Spain’s southern tip, is set to be a major point of contention in the exit talks along with issues relating to Britain’s access to the EU’s single market or the future rights of EU citizens in the U.K. and of Britons living in Europe. Rows between Spain and Britain over Gibraltar have held up entire EU deals in the past – including current legislation governing air travel – and Brussels is keen to avoid a new bilateral dispute getting in the way of an orderly Brexit.

“This seems intended to give Spain something so they don’t try to hold the whole withdrawal treaty hostage over it,” one senior EU diplomat said in Brussels. According to the EU’s draft joint position on the exit talks, which the remaining members are due to approve on April 29, “after the United Kingdom leaves the Union, no agreement between the EU and the United Kingdom may apply to the territory of Gibraltar without the agreement between the Kingdom of Spain and the United Kingdom.” In essence, it offers Madrid a special share of power over Gibraltar’s fate, but only once the territory is no longer an internal EU problem. A spokesman for the Spanish government said Madrid was satisfied with the decision.

“It is what we wanted and what we have said from the beginning… The recognition by the European Union of the legal and political situation that Spain has defended fully satisfies us,” Inigo Mendez de Vigo told a news conference following the weekly cabinet meeting. The Government of Gibraltar issued a statement on Friday evening saying that the draft suggested Spain was trying to get away with mortgaging the future relationship between the EU and Gibraltar. “This is a disgraceful attempt by Spain to manipulate the European Council for its own, narrow, political interests (…) a clear manifestation of the predictably predatory attitude that we anticipated Spain would seek to abusively impose on its partners,” the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, said in an e-mailed statement.

And you should wish to be part of a Union that does such things? I don’t get that. What is that, Stockholm Syndrome?

• The European Union Lays Out A Greek Trap For The United Kingdom (Coppola)

Following the UK’s formal resignation on Wednesday March 29th 2017, the European Union has now laid out its approach to negotiating the United Kingdom’s exit from the bloc. At first glance, the draft negotiation guidelines appear friendly and reasonable. But don’t be fooled. They contain a trap with which followers of the Greek bailout negotiations should be all too familiar. At this point, Brexit supporters will no doubt scream “The UK is not like Greece!”. Of course it isn’t. It is one of the largest economies in Europe, and its departure will leave a gaping wound in the EU which will take some time to heal. A smooth, orderly exit is in everyone’s interests, to minimize damage on both sides and promote healing. And this is what both the UK and the EU say they want. So why do I say there is a trap?

The essence of the Greek negotiations is that the debt relief that Greece so desperately needs is conditional on Greece meeting all the EU creditors’ conditions, in full. The EU will not even discuss debt relief until sufficient progress has been made on everything else. Every time Greece draws nearer to debt relief it is snatched away, either by adding new conditions or by finding reasons to doubt that conditions have really been met. Of course, the UK is not looking for debt relief. It is after another prize. Theresa May’s letter outlined what the UK wants “Agreeing a high-level approach to the issues arising from our withdrawal will of course be an early priority. But we also propose a bold and ambitious Free Trade Agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union. This should be of greater scope and ambition than any such agreement before it so that it covers sectors crucial to our linked economies such as financial services and network industries.”

Wonderful. Not only does the UK want a free trade agreement to be agreed before it leaves the bloc, it apparently wants that agreement to give it better terms than any trade agreement the EU has with any other country. I don’t know who constructed this flight of fancy, but it has about as much chance of seeing the light of day as a bottom-feeder in the Marianas Trench.

“Request a Norway-like agreement for an interim period – something that they cannot refuse..”

• Theresa May May Have Miscalculated (Varoufakis)

Prime Minister May is keen to avoid a defeat at the hands of EU negotiators determined to do to the UK that which they did to Greece in 2015. Correctly, she has set out to arm herself with a credible threat. The problem is that she may have miscalculated her optimal strategy. By making a hard Brexit the default of the negotiations’ process, Mrs May has secured its credibility. However, a credible threat can still produce an undesirable outcome. London’s greatest miscalculation would be to assume that the EU’s negotiators are committed to the bloc’s economic interests. Whilst negotiating Greece’s debt to the EU with them, I realised in horror that they cared very little about getting their money back and a great deal more about shoring up their relative positions in the games they play with one another – even if this sacrificed large economic gains. Mrs May will encounter this mindset soon in Berlin, Brussels and Paris.

If my experiences are anything to go by, a frustrating two years await British negotiators. They are faced with the EU’s favourite tactics: The EU Run-Around (as Brussels refers them to Berlin and vice versa), the Swedish National Anthem Routine (the feeling that whether you have outlined a sensible proposal or sung Sweden’s national anthem they react the same way), the All-Or-Nothing Ruse (refusing to discuss any issue unless all issues are simultaneously discussed) and the Blame Game (censuring you for THEIR recalcitrance). Nothing good, for Britain or for the EU, will come out of this process. It is why I recommend a strategy that robs Brussels of all room to manoeuvre. That is: Request a Norway-like agreement for an interim period – something that they cannot refuse – and empower the next UK parliament to design and pursue Britain’s long-term relationship with the EU.

“Observers fear that Turkey could take other countries along with it. The country holds $270 billion of debt with international banks, with $87 billion of that total in Spain, $42 billion in France and $15 billion in Germany.”

• The Demise of the Anatolian Tiger – Turkey on Verge of Bankruptcy (Spiegel)

[..] the aftermath of the coup attempt — the mass arrests of opposition activists and the confiscation of companies – has scared investors off. The rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have slashed Turkey’s credit rating to junk status and foreign investment plunged by over 40% last year. Yigit says that he can hardly find anyone anymore who is interested in doing business in Turkey. “The risk is simply too high for investors,” he says. Meanwhile, clients who have been economically involved in the country for years are now pulling their money out. The capital flight has triggered a downward spiral that has been particularly noticeable in the construction industry.

Turkey’s high growth rates in recent years were fueled primarily by infrastructure projects, with Erdogan pouring money into the construction of highways, hospitals and airports. Now, though, there is insufficient foreign capital available and growth is stagnating. Furthermore, political instability has led to a steep drop in tourism revenues, with a plunge of roughly one-third last year. There are hundreds of hotels up for sale on the Turkish Riviera, on the country’s southwest coast, and some 600 of 2,000 shops in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar have been forced to close since last summer, according to the bazaar’s merchant association. Turkish Airlines has taken 30 planes out of service.

The consequences of the struggling economy can be seen in day-to-day life: Companies have been forced to lay off workers and cut salaries; people have less money. Domestic consumption, which made up 60% of the country’s GDP last year, has shrunk. At the same time, the Turkish currency, the lira, has rapidly lost value and inflation stands at 10%. “We are heading toward the worst-case scenario: economic stagnation combined with persistent inflation,” says Istanbul-based economic writer Mustafa Sönmez. “Turkey is on the verge of bankruptcy.” Observers fear that Turkey could take other countries along with it. The country holds $270 billion of debt with international banks, with $87 billion of that total in Spain, $42 billion in France and $15 billion in Germany. Should the country default or partially default, Sönmez believes, it could trigger another financial crisis in Europe.

Turkey’s army has gotten even weaker after Erdogan fired tens of thousands, among them many officers.

• The Pentagon Doesn’t Want Turkey’s Help In Syria (WE)

Like a marriage held together for the sake of the kids, the U.S. and Turkey keep saying nice things in public, while privately fuming and slowly drifting apart. The growing rift between the two countries stems from the intractable dispute over the U.S. plan to liberate Raqqa with a loose coalition of Syrian fighters comprising roughly 40% Kurdish YPG militia members, who Turkey considers terrorists. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has offered his military to drive the Islamic State out of its self-proclaimed capital in Raqqa, if only the U.S. will quit the Kurds. Turkey regards the Kurdish Popular Protection Units, or YPG, as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, which has been declared a terrorist group by both Turkey and the U.S. But the Pentagon says the Kurds have proven to be the most battle-hardened and combat-effective force fighting ISIS in Syria, and it has no plans to abandon them now.

Publicly the U.S. says it’s still working with its NATO ally Turkey to find a role for it in the upcoming Raqqa offensive, but here’s the unspoken truth: The U.S. has also judged that the Turkish military is not up to the task, based on its performance in northern Syria. On Aug. 24, Turkey launched “Operation Euphrates Shield,” sending tank and troops into Syria with the stated objective of pushing ISIS back 60 miles from its shared border, and the unstated goal of keeping Kurdish forces from controlling an unbroken swath of land stretching back into Iraq. This past week, Turkey declared Euphrates Shield a success and ended the mission, a move Pentagon sources say was in fact largely because the U.S., Russia and Syria stymied the Turkish offensive from any further gains. The Turks did take the northern Syrian towns of Jarablus, Dabiq and al-Bab from ISIS, but their plan to move against the Kurds in Manbij was foiled when the U.S. positioned Army Rangers just outside the city and declared Manbij was in no further need of liberation.

And the Turkish forces had also suffered heavy losses in the fight against ISIS in al-Bab, or as one Pentagon official put it, “They got their asses kicked.” Meanwhile, Syrian and Russian forces have advanced across the Turkish forces’ southern flank in Syria, effectively blocking any movement south to Raqqa. Essentially hemmed in with nowhere to go, the Turkish forces called it a day and declared mission accomplished. Several Pentagon officials, who talked the Washington Examiner on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss war planning publicly, said the major U.S. takeaway is that Turkish troops lack the training, logistics and weaponry to successfully launch the siege of a fortified and well-defended city. Consider that across the border in Iraq, 100,000 Iraqi troops have all they can handle trying to finish off fewer than 1,000 ISIS fighters in west Mosul.

Yeah, we’re so smart.

• Salmon Farming In Crisis: ‘A Chemical Arms Race In The Seas’ (G.)

Every day, salmon farmers across the world walk into steel cages – in the seas off Scotland or Norway or Iceland – and throw in food. Lots of food; they must feed tens of thousands of fish before the day is over. They must also check if there are problems, and there is one particular problem they are coming across more and more often. Six months ago, I met one of these salmon farmers, on the Isle of Skye. He looked at me and held out a palm – in it was a small, ugly-looking creature, all articulated shell and tentacles: a sea louse. He could crush it between his fingers, but said he was impressed that this parasite, which lives by attaching itself to a fish and eating its blood and skin, was threatening not just his own job, but could potentially wipe out a global multibillion-dollar industry that feeds millions of people.

“For a wee creature, it is impressive. But what can we do?” he asks. “Sometimes it seems nature is against us and we are fighting a losing battle. They are everywhere now, and just a few can kill a fish. When I started in fish farming 30 years ago, there were barely any. Now they are causing great problems.” Lepeophtheirus salmonis, or the common salmon louse, now infests nearly half of Scotland’s salmon farms. Last year lice killed thousands of tonnes of farmed fish, caused skin lesions and secondary infections in millions more, and cost the Scottish industry alone around £300m in trying to control them. Scotland has some of the worst lice infestations in the world, and last year saw production fall for the first time in years.

But in the past few weeks it has become clear that the lice problem is growing worldwide and is far more resistant than the industry thought. Norway produced 60,000 tonnes less than expected last year because of lice, and Canada and a dozen other countries were all hit badly. Together, it is estimated that companies across the world must spend more than £1bn a year on trying to eradicate lice, and the viruses and diseases they bring. As a result of the lice infestations, the global price of salmon has soared, and world production fallen. Earlier this year freedom of information [FoI] requests of the Scottish government showed that 45 lochs had been badly polluted by the antibiotics and pesticides used to control lice – and that more and more toxic chemicals were being used.

You can’t let children pay the price.

• Italy Praised For Giving Lone Child Refugees Legal Protection (Week)

Italy has become Europe’s first country to pass a law giving comprehensive protection to lone child migrants. Known as the Zampa law, the legislation sets minimum standards of care, such as reducing the time children can be kept in migrant reception centres, guaranteeing access to healthcare and setting a ten-day window for authorities to confirm their identities. It also prohibits turning unaccompanied and separated children away at the border or if it could cause them harm, AP reports. Unicef, the UN’s children agency praised the move and said it was the first of its kind in Europe. Afshan Khan, Unicef’s special coordinator for the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe, said: “While across Europe we have seen fences going up, children detained and pledges unmet, the Italian parliamentarians have shown their compassion and duty to young refugees and migrants.

“This new law serves not only to give refugee and migrant children a sense of predictability in their uncertain lives after risking so much to get to Europe, it serves as a model for how other European countries could put in place a legislative framework that supports protection.” The number of unaccompanied child migrants arriving in Italy is believed to still be on the increase, says the charity. In 2016, around 26,000 children arrived in the country without their families, the majority crossing the Mediterranean in unsafe boats from North Africa. In the first two months of 2017, 2,000 arrived, the majority aged between 14 and 17. Italy’s move is in stark contrast to the UK, where MPs earlier this month chose not to continue a scheme to accept more lone child refugees from Europe.

Just lovely.

• Europe Keeps Its Rescue Ships Far From Where Refugees Drown (I’Cept)

An average of 3,500 people have died each year while trying to make the journey to Italy from North Africa since 2014. Their vessels are overcrowded, unseaworthy, and have a near-nothing chance of making it to Europe. Most of the boats sink just 20 to 40 miles from the Libyan coast. These are preventable deaths. Since 2014, the European Union has deliberately chosen to keep their coast guard patrol boats far from where the shipwrecks happen, a decision detailed in an internal letter obtained by The Intercept and other leaked documents. Saving more lives, the logic goes, will only encourage more refugees to come. The result is that rescue boats are kept away from where rescues are actually needed.

The Italian navy used to run patrols near the Libyan coast. Their operation, called Mare Nostrum – “our sea” in Latin – involved a large mobilization of ships, planes, and helicopters in international waters close to Libya, where boats carrying refugees regularly capsized and sank. Mare Nostrum was enormously successful — in the year it ran, it saved over 150,000 people. Still, on October 31, 2014, Italy announced it would phase out the program. The following day, Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, took over with an operation called Triton. In a press release at the time, Frontex said its operation followed in the wake of Mare Nostrum and was intended to support the Italian authorities. There was one key difference from Mare Nostrum, however: Frontex would limit its patrols to just 30 miles off Italy’s coast, which was about 130 miles from Libya — at least a 12-hour sail. Frontex was deliberately not patrolling the area where most of the shipwrecks occurred.

What’s more, according to an internal letter obtained by The Intercept, the director of operations at Frontex privately told Italian authorities that his ships should not be called on to immediately respond to distress calls from outside their 30-mile patrol area. “Frontex is concerned about the engagement of Frontex deployed assets in the activities happening significantly outside the operational area,” Frontex’s director, Klaus Roesler, wrote to the head of Italy’s Immigration and Border Police, Giovanni Pinto, on November 25, 2014. The letter has been referenced in Italian newspapers and released with redactions that covered detailed descriptions of how Frontex coordinated its assistance with rescue efforts. The Intercept is publishing the letter in full for the first time.

Like any other vessels at sea, Frontex ships are obligated under maritime law to respond to distress calls when ordered by the relevant national authorities. For the Italians, an overloaded boat with an untrained captain was a distress situation by default. Typically, someone calls the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center in Rome by satellite phone from a boat or from the Libyan coast, and Italy initiates search and rescue. But for Frontex, at the time, that was not enough proof. [..] Frontex knew it had to respond to emergency calls. But it was deliberately patrolling in the wrong area and quibbling with definitions of distress, meaning that its ships would almost certainly arrive late, if at all.